


Unsettled

by LananiA3O



Category: Darksiders (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Funeral Pyre, Gen, Headcanon, Kinslaying, Lilith/Absalom (mentioned) - Freeform, Minor Character Deaths, Origin Story, early nephilim days, fan-diservice nudity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 07:59:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17300810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: The Council called him "all that is unsettled in the hearts of that which lives and breathes", a fancy, poetic description for what set Strife apart from his siblings from the day he was born: the endless struggle to improve, to prevail. What his siblings would eventually learn from humans thousands of years into their lives, Strife knew from the day he was born: just because something looks and even is weak, does not mean it can't get stronger and better. Even the weakest can one day be great.





	1. The Rotten Batch

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born from two questions:  
> 1) Why does Strife admire humanity so much?  
> 2) Why was he considered the black sheep of the family?
> 
> Could it be that Strife himself was weak, by nephilim standards, when he was "born" and that he consequently knows the struggles of humaniy better than most?
> 
> Note: This fic draws from elements of all three games, both comics, and the novel, although whenever the material conflicts with one another, the games are considered higher canon.
> 
> Warnings: lots of blood and guts, and minor character death (including some of the nephilim killing each other), nudity of the decidedly not fanservicy kind, and mentions of Lilith/Absalom, but this story will be 98% gen (if not more).

_This is torture._

Death suppressed the instinctive desire to cringe as Absolution sliced through skin and flesh and bone alike, cutting off the scream of blood-curdling panic that had been echoing across the plains.

Another sister defeated. Another sister dead.

Death was not usually disturbed by the violent passing of a conquered foe. It was neither in his name nor in his nature. The strong survive. The weak die. Such was the way of life and death. For every death, there was another birth. There was no reason at all to be upset about such simple, natural truths of reality.

He was also used to the bloody, gory mess that Absolution left behind whenever Absalom wielded it with stone-shattering strength. Absalom was the first of the nephilim and the strongest, Death’s only older brother, and, by all rights and in every way, the leader of the nephilim, no matter how much Lilith liked to pretend that they belonged to her. She was NOT Death’s mother. Nor Absalom’s. She may have created the nephilim, but she was not one of them and she never would be, and Death refused to give her an inch of compliance or weakness.

Sometimes Lilith found that amusing. She’d call him her ‘sensitive boy’ and pat his cheek, or at least try to do so, as if he was a mere child. Absalom would laugh and agree, before disappearing into his tent with her. Sometimes she found it not amusing at all. Sometimes she called him an unruly dog that should be put down. Absalom would laugh and remind her that Death was the strongest among the nephilim, save him of course, and that to kill him would not only be troublesome and complicated, but also a waste of a perfectly good, blood-thirsty fighter, one of their best mages, and their best crafter.

And at the end of the day, even Lilith did not want to sour Absalom’s mood. Why, Death would never understand. All it would take for Absalom to forgive her was for her to crawl into his bed again, anyway. The thought made him want to cringe again, but even so, he remained still.

No, Death had no issue with Absalom (except maybe his affinity towards Lilith’s wiles), nor towards the killing of another warrior, even though Absalom was being terribly crude about it as usual. What bothered Death was that this had not been any foe.

It had been a sister.

Death had many sisters, of course. This had been going on for a while, after all. Once a month, Lilith would meet the Nephilim on some demon world, climb under Absalom’s sheets as payment for letting her cut off his left arm, and then work some Maker’s magic to turn the removed appendage into dust and mould it into ten cocoons the size of the average nephilim. What magic exactly that was, Death did not know, and it irked him, given that none of the makers were willing to share the secrets of their craft with the nephilim and Death himself could only do so much. Lilith could probably have told him, if he had begged and groveled at her feet, but Death recoiled at the thought.

He’d sooner throw himself to a crowd of those pathetic birds from the White City.

The results of Lilith’s visits were always the same: ten cocoons of dusty gray that shimmered in the light of whatever dying world they had met upon. Absalom, minus one arm that would grow back in a day, waited with his battle ax, while Lilith sat on a make-shift throne behind him, dressed in next to nothing and smelling like a cheap demon whore, and the rest of the nephilim surrounded the cocoons, forming a small arena. The firstborn were always first in line, since Absalom had declared it their duty to make sure that no coward would be able to run. Not that cowardice was common among nephilim, although it had happened before.

“Move over, will you.” The statement that was only not an order because the speaker knew better than to make demands of Death, and it was only not a question because she was too proud to ask for anything. It was Fury and Death rolled his eyes. It was _always_ Fury. “I want to see!”

“I believe you’ve seen enough split skulls already when we annihilated the first half of this planet, Fury. You know what they look like.”

“I _do_ know, Death.” She sounded angry, which was only natural. She had chosen her name well. “But if we all have to show up for this farce, we should all have at least a glance of the action! I haven’t seen a single drop of blood in hours!”

“Then maybe I should bring out Harvester and give you what you want,” Death lobbed back at her.

She was an impatient one, but at least she was strong. At least she had lived. It was more than Death could have said of their latest sister. And the one before her. And the one before _her_.

Which brought him back to the urge of his muscles to twitch, to show some hint of reaction to the blood bath in front of him.

Nine nephilim had broken out of their cocoons today to see the light of day for the first time. Nine nephilim had been greeted by Absolution. Nine nephilim had died screaming. Death, who had observed this ritual since the second time it had ever occurred, had been wondering if a day would ever come that none of them would live. Apparently, that day was today.

Of course, there was always one or maybe even two who did not make it. Absalom was strong, faster than his stature would suggest, and healed just as fast as Death did. He was almost impervious to magic and relentless in his assaults. Most importantly, he was without mercy. Of course that meant not _all_ of their siblings survived their first day in this world. It was only natural.

 _But all ten of them?_ This was new. This was... Death struggled to think of an appropriate word. What was that cold feeling that gripped him at the thought, at the sight of the mangled corpses of his youngest batch of siblings? Was this... the horror that other races felt, when the nephilim washed over their worlds like a tide of blood and death?

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

The sickly green mane next to him made way for dark red, accompanied by sharp hissing from Famine, whose voice was thin as dust, as always. Terrible as Death’s oldest sister could be in battle, he was not surprised Pestilence willingly stepped back to let Fury take her place in the front row, nor was he surprised that Famine reacted to it with little more than mild annoyance. Both of them enjoyed turning worlds into uninhabitable dust, but frontline fighters they were not. A wide smirk stretched Fury’s lips.

“Looks like I’m not too late after all! There’s one left!”

“Yes. There is.” _But for how long?_ Death did not want to think about it. He had already lost four sisters and five brothers today and not in combat at the hands of their enemies, but in a slaughter organized by Absalom. He was hoping that this last one would fare better, of course. Maybe Lilith’s magic had gone a little awry this time and all the strength and fierceness had ended up with this last one, but Death considered it unlikely.

No. More likely than not, he was about to lose another brother or sister. And for once it actually grated on that pathetic excuse of a soul his opponents so often appealed to.

Maybe Lilith was right. Maybe he was getting sensitive. This was the seventy-first time they were doing this murderous dance after all.

In the arena, Absalom had finished wiping his nameless sister’s brains and blood off of Absolution. Normally, this was the part at which he would start grinning, knowing that the celebrations after the initiation would find Lilith in his bed once more, and that tomorrow would yield the slaughter of the remaining half of this planet’s population, but this time Absalom did not smile. If anything at all, he looked furious.

“Pathetic!” Absalom spat on the corpses at his feet, then pointed his ax towards the final cocoon. “Come out, you coward, so I can cut _you_ down as well!”

The arena fell silent. The wind that haunted these plains made the slightest noise and every now and then some piece of armor jingled softly, but the cocoon was quiet as a grave. Was it possible that there was nothing in there? Or that Lilith’s magic had failed and the thing inside was dead already, stillborn? Death supposed it was possible. No-one was infallible, except maybe the Creator, though even that was debatable given what a mess of a universe he had established.

Whatever the explanation was, it did not improve Absalom’s mood.

“Come out right now, or I will hack you to pieces where you stand!”

 _You’re going to hack them to pieces where they stand anyway_ , Death wanted to say, but he held his tongue. Provoking Absalom when he was in such a foul mood was never a good idea, not even for Death himself.

Absalom, snarled, hoisted his ax high over his shoulder, and made to swing it hard, when a new sound broke the silence.

 _Crack. Hiss. Crack_. They were the first sounds Death ever remembered. A hull slowly breaking as the figure inside stretched to get out. Hushed breaths escaping through tiny fissures, greedily gasping for air. He remembered how loud they had sounded in his ears when he had been the one coming into this world, and how ridiculously quiet they sounded from the outside. But at this point, they might have been thunder. The rest of the arena was silent, six-hundred and nineteen nephilim standing taut as a bow string in anticipation.

The first thing to break through was a hand, darker than those of most of his nephilim brothers and sisters. Not as dark as Pestilence, Silence, or Carnage, but darker than most. It fumbled at the fissure it had created, probing carefully as if looking for something. _A hesitant one. Just perfect._ Death could already see them dying in his mind. Then, a second hand joined, gripping the other side of the gap with sharp nails. The movement stopped and so did the labored breathing.

A moment later, the hands pushed and the cocoon sprang open like a carefully prepped egg.

 _Not hesitant, but methodical. Smart._ For a moment, Death felt hopeful that there might be a chance for this one after all.

Then Absalom swung his ax at last.

The last of this batch— _a brother_ , Death noted—looked up in surprise, eyes wide with fear, then rolled out of the way immediately. They had a golden shimmer to them, although it was hard to tell from the distance. Death doubted he would get close enough while this one still lived. At last, he allowed himself a tiny sigh.

This one was scrawny, thin as a stick, as if Famine had already hunted him for days before his creation, and while he seemed quick and sure-footed, Death knew that that was not going to save him. Even as he watched his youngest brother dart across the battlefield, trying desperately not to slip on the guts and the brains or be impaled by the outstretched weapon of the laughing firstborn surrounding him, Death knew it would not suffice. It didn’t take long before he dodged in Death’s direction, only to be greeted by the blunt side of Harvester and the coldest glare Death could muster. It drew the little glimmer of hope in those bright eyes straight out and threw it in the dirt.

A good defense was never wrong. Knowing how to evade could save a warrior’s life in battle. But nephilim were attackers, not defenders. Even if this one could evade long enough for Absalom to tire and call off the fight, which had only happened once, with Death himself, little brother would not survive in the society, the army, that was the nephilim. He would be branded a coward and somewhere, sometime, on some battlefield, one of his brothers or sisters would rather let him be horrifically maimed and killed than to help a coward.

As much as it pained Death to admit it, this one had no future.

“Fight, you coward!” To Death’s left, Fury screamed what was on everyone’s mind and Death had to wonder: was she just bored or did she actually care? He could never quite read her. “Stop dodging! Pick up a blade and fight!”

The others agreed. Slowly, but steadily, more shouts came from all around the arena.

Their little brother looked annoyed at best at the suggestion. He gave the blades one look, then continued dodging. Death could hardly blame him. It was doubtful he’d be strong enough to even wield any of them properly. This one seemed to lack the instinct to fight. A death sentence for one of their kind.

“Absalom, my dear...” To Death’s right, Lilith let out an exaggerated yawn, while stretching herself in just the right ways to make her clothes slide just far enough to reveal the hint of too much. She trailed her hands over her curves as she leaned back in her throne. “He’s a lost cause. Put him out of his misery already so we can end this farce, please?”

Absalom rested his ax on his shoulder and grinned. It truly was ridiculous what a love-drunk fool he became every time he looked at Lilith. Death would never understand how or why. Lilith’s charms had never worked on him.

Apparently, they were barely working on the scrawny one, either. Death watched with curiosity as he followed the sound of Lilith’s voice at first, like all the other nephilim around him. Like a puppy on a leash. But then, the meaning of the words seemed to register in his brain, and his face, dark as it was already, grew even darker with a fierce scowl. It hurt him to let go of Lilith’s gaze. It pained him to claw his way out from underneath her spell, but Death could see him do it. He turned back to Absalom, grabbed the first thing near his feet in his hands—a broken, but razor-sharp feather from the wings of one of his dead, older sisters, the only one of the bunch Death had considered to have even a hope of touching Absalom, if only she had been faster—and lunged straight for Absalom’s neck.

But an ax had longer reach than a make-shift dagger.

It was a split-second that had saved Absalom. No doubt Lilith had lessened her hold on him the instant she had realized what the young one had been doing. Absalom had reacted with instincts of a cold-blooded killer and had swung Absolution hard and fast. It connected with the little brother’s rib cage hard and fast, burying itself in his organs and tearing out flesh and bone alike as it retreated. The wound was less of a cut and more of a crater. It bled deep crimson and spilled his entrails, in spite of the hand trying desperately to hold them in. The fierceness fell from his blood-spattered face as he sunk to the ground.

Another failed nephilim. Another feast for the crows.

Death felt... he wasn’t entirely sure. He wasn’t surprised. Nor angry. Nor frustrated. He felt... empty. Empty and cold and bitter. Was this sadness? He had never felt this way before.

Absalom spit on the corpse as he had spit on the others. “What a waste!” In an instant, his bloodlust was replaced by rage. Absolution disappeared into thin air as he marched towards the throne and wrapped his remaining hand firmly around Lilith’s neck. “THIS is what you took one of my arms for?! Ten weak and miserable failures?! Ten cowards?!”

Apparently, Lilith was no stranger to such treatment. At least that was the only reason Death could imagine why she looked so smug despite of her predicament. If he hadn’t know better, he would even have said that she was enjoying getting strangled.

“Such violence, my love...” There it was again, the honey in Lilith’s voice as she slid one of her hands along the arm that choked her. “Everyone makes mistakes every once in a while. Next time will be sooo much better...” Death wasn’t quite sure whether ‘next time’ meant the next time she’d spawn ten nephilim or the next time she’d be Absalom’s plaything. He had a feeling it was both. “Let me take care of you and your wounds. You were victorious ten times today. You deserve a champion’s treatment.”

“Yes, preferably somewhere we don’t have to watch the performance,” Death retorted much to her annoyance. Lilith’s charm did nothing for him, but at least her scorn made him feel all warm and happy. As happy as anyone named Death could get. As happy as anyone who had just watched ten brothers and sisters die could get.

In contrast, Absalom merely snarled at him, then unclenched his fingers from around Lilith’s throat and headed towards his tent on the far side of the vale. Lilith trailed behind him, hips swinging seductively with every step, muttering something along the lines of ‘what a rotten bunch’, while the rest of the Nephilim slowly shuffled away. There were discontented murmurs of disappointment all around, but only Fury and Conquest had the audacity to mimic Absalom and spit on the pile of the dead. Death felt sorely tempted to knock both their heads together. He had no trouble desecrating a corpse if there was some knowledge or some battlefield advantage to be gained from it, but to do it out of pure spite was petty, unnecessary, and childish.

In the end, he let them go. This day had been troublesome enough. He didn’t want to start a fight with two of his _living_ siblings. Not now that there were ten lying dead at his feet.

Ten. Dead. Nephilim. None of whom had lived for more than five minutes. How had this happened? He was half-tempted to bring the spirit of the last one back from the dead for a second to ask him directly. More importantly though: why did it bother him and how could he shut this damn feeling off?

None of that mattered now, though. What mattered was that the day was done for everybody else. Absalom was on his way back to his bed with Lilith. His other brothers and sisters were on their way back to their own tents to sharpen their weapons and count their supplies before the upcoming battle tomorrow. To them, the ten bodies were just that. Bodies. Bodies that could just lie and rot and turn to ash like everybody else who had been slaughtered here.

To Death, they had been brothers and sisters, even if only for a few minutes. It had to count for something.

For shrouds he ripped apart the cloth that was supposed to make for his tent tonight and doused them in oil _. Just as well. I’m not sleeping tonight anyway._ He wrapped the bodies in them one by one and piled them up in reverse order. The brother who had died first would also be the first to burn. That was only fair. Had he not had any magic, he would have needed tinder for the flames as well, but arcane knowledge bypassed all that. He could summon fire easily enough and nephilim flesh and skin, though tough as the hide of any demon, was nowhere near as resistant to flames. Death touched his hand to where the split face of his tenth-youngest sibling rested, spoke the incantation quietly but clearly, and watched as the flames started dancing. He took a step back and finally allowed his body to cringe and sigh and express all that had been bottled up inside.

He hated this part of the initiation. He hated it with a passion. He hated being the only one who stood watch as his siblings were at least discarded with a minimum of dignity, every single time. This time, he hated it even more. This time there were ten bodies. He was likely going to stand here all night. Death took a deep breath and resigned himself to a night full of the taste of ash and the smell of burning flesh.

It was because this ritual was so familiar, because he had done it so many times, that he did not pay it any mind when a piece of cloth at the very bottom of the pile moved softly. Fire was a powerful force. The gases it produced could lift cloth easily. And there was a light wind. This was not unusual.

But the cloth wouldn’t stop moving.

Death, now curious as to what exactly had happened here, bent down to inspect the unruly piece of fabric, only to find a dark hand clawing at his arm.

He was imagining this. Clearly it had been a long day and the sheer disaster that had been this month’s batch had left him slightly susceptible to tricks of the mind—

The cloth coughed. Then, the bodies shifted. No. One of them shifted and the others merely followed the movement. The hand around his wrist dug in hard enough to draw blood, a shallow wound that healed almost instantly, and yet, it had made him bleed. And Death had yet to meet a corpse that could do that.

He acted on sheer instinct, grabbing the arm with both hands and pulling sharply. The pile of bodies toppled over, turning one big fire into nine small ones. A few individual flames sprang across to the writhing form, as if disappointed and angry that Death had robbed them of a tenth of their fuel. And speaking of fuel, what had he been thinking when he had doused that sheet in oil?

It was no use. The fabric was fast ablaze. Death cursed under his breath as he ripped it off the crawling brother in front of him and replaced it with his own cowl instead. It was barely enough to cover his blood-drenched, trembling body, but it had to do.

His brother was alive. One of his brothers was alive! Far be it from Death to believe in the miracles of the Creator as the birds did, but he had to admit that this was beyond unlikely. He had seen Absalom’s ax nearly cut him in half. He had seen his guts spill from his shattered rib cage. Jus how--?

It was a question for another time. Death frowned at the sight in front of him. The tips of the soft spikes of black hair—or at least he thought it was black, the fire gave it a reddish glow—that flowed back and upwards from his brother’s head were singed and at the base on the left side, a large burn came dangerously close to his eye. Death touched the wound carefully to assess its severity. He had known that even that would be excruciatingly painful and yet he was surprised when his brother recoiled in agony. Death stared at his fingers in quiet marvel. There wasn’t a single trace of blood or soot on them.

There was no burn there. So why was his brother— _oh_. “I see...”

At last, his brother looked at him, and now, with his life force nearly drained, up close and without the glow of battle, Death could see his irises bright and clearly. They were pale gold.

“I see what’s going on here,” Death finally said as he moved the cowl to inspect the wound Absolution had left. As expected, the edges of it were not truly bloody, the guts not really hanging from its side. “You used a shape-shifting glamor to make Absalom think you were dead.”

It was impressive. Death could usually tell very well whether someone was alive or dead. So could Lilith, for that matter. For his little brother to have fooled both of them... It was a very smart idea. Or, if it had not been planned, at least very powerful magic, especially after taking a hit from Absolution. No, it had not been lethal, but it sure looked like it hadn’t been pleasant either.

His little brother— _he’ll need to give himself a name, and quickly_ , Death realized. A nephilim without a name was just another unknown corpse. If Absalom found out that he had lived, but hadn’t even had the power to do that... Perhaps he could make use of the glamor again. Play dead for just a little longer. Hardly an honorable tactic, but all was fair in matters of life and death, at least as far as Death was concerned. And if even one of his new siblings could have a chance of surviving this night, that would be good enough for him.

“Must have been some powerful magic to fool all of us,” Death eventually said, and there was a spark of warmth, of longing, of hope, in those golden eyes as his brother tried—and failed, although Death tried not to think about that—to go from crawling to standing. “How did you do that?”

And just like that, the warmth was gone. _What did I do wrong_ , was all Death could think as a bloodied hand shoved him back hard as it could. Pitiful enough as the attempt was, the surprise made Death stagger.

“Go to hell...” His voice was bright, but full of ash and bitterness. “Just... go to hell...”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Death said with a slight chuckle. He wasn’t sure how Lilith imprinted a basic amount of knowledge onto each of them during their creation, but she did. Death couldn’t help but wonder what in that knowledge had made his little brother think that going to hell was an insult to a nephilim.

The amusement vanished as he saw his brother glance around, looking back into the direction of the far-away nephilim encampment with sheer hatred, then starting to crawl away into the opposite direction. Towards the hill beyond which their enemies tended to their life stock pastures, the people whom the nephilim had already half-butchered. The people they would crush tomorrow, when they brought their cattle to the fields.

It was blatantly obvious that every little movement hurt. After a few feet of crawling, his brother tried to stand, fell, stood up again, walked a step, then fell again. Rinse and repeat. Death sighed in frustration.

“You’re never going to make it across this hill in your condition. I can help you—“

“I don’t want your help.”

“You don’t say...” Death rolled his eyes and advanced slowly. His brother recoiled instantly. Just what exactly had he done to upset him this much? He had pulled him out of that funeral pile. He had given him his cowl. He was trying to treat his injuries. “Just what is your problem?”

“You.” He spit the word out as if it were poison, then got up again. A few steps. A stumble. A few steps. A stumble. Rinse. Repeat. At the base of the hill he stopped, looking up at the mound as if to judge the distance. It wasn’t a very high hill nor a very steep one for a healthy nephilim, but then again, _he_ was anything but healthy. He cursed at the hill, then turned back to the fire. His glance fell past the burning bodies, to where the campfires flickered in the distance and his eyes narrowed. “You... and your skeleton friend... and all of you...” Even though every step was wonky and made him hiss in pain, he started climbing the hill. “I’d rather be dead than pitied by you.”

“Fine!” Death’s patience wasn’t endless. He couldn’t extend his help to someone who so blatantly refused to accept it. He didn’t want to. He was not going to beg. “Crawl off to die then! But know this: even if you do somehow survive climbing this hill, even if you make it thirty miles in your condition—tomorrow, Absalom will lead our people that very same way and we will roll over this planet with fire and steel until it is nothing but cold, dead ash. And if you don’t have a name by then, he will kill you. Slowly.”

His brother stopped, cringed, and continued walking. Death cursed in the four foulest languages that came to his mind. _What an ungrateful, stubborn brat!_ Perhaps that would be a good name for him. _Brat._ Or maybe something from another language that encapsulated the concept of “ungratefulness and bad life choices”. He’d have to think on that.

He was almost done piling the rest of the bodies up again, when he saw her approaching from the distance. Famine, with her pale, thin hair, and her haggard legs. _He had said ‘your skeleton friend’..._ Death glanced back to the now empty hill. Somehow, his brother had managed the climb. And somehow he had seen Famine approach long before Death had been able to make out her shape in the darkness.

Somehow he was starting to have the feeling that if the initiation had not taken place in close quarters, Absalom might have gotten more than he had bargained for. Death hurried to undo the more obvious tracks his youngest brother had left behind, then tended to the funeral pyre once more.

“Death?” Famine’s thin voice scratched over her teeth and lips like splintered nails over a shield. “Why do you do this to yourself every time?”

“I don’t know.” It was an honest confession. He was tempted to say ‘grief’ or ‘respect’, but he was Death. Such things were beyond him. Or at least it had to seem so.

“Next month will be better,” Famine offered in the closest thing to compassion that Death had ever heard from a nephilim. “And tomorrow, we will fight a glorious battle.”

“Yes, we will,” Death agreed. Half-heartedly. He watched until Famine had shuffled out of earshot before turning from the pyre one last time and muttering under his breath.

“And if I have particularly bad luck, I will get to watch one of our brothers die twice.”


	2. Our Beginnings Are Humble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strife has survived Absalom's ax and Death's pyre, but his troubles are far from over. As he finds himself in the care of the very people his own race is about to destroy, he realizes that pride is the first thing that needs to go if he ever wants to have a hope of survival.

_Well, this doesn’t feel like the Kingdom of the Dead._

Somehow, the thought popped into his head even before he was aware of what exactly it was that he was feeling. Somehow, the feeling wasn’t what his brain latched on to at first either. Instead, it was the phrase ‘Kingdom of the Dead’ that echoed throughout his skull like a distant drum. Supposedly, it was the place where all souls of the dead went after their owners’ untimely demise. A place of judgment, penance, and agony, before being released back into the Well of Souls, into rebirth. That was all good and well...

But how in Creation did he even know any of that? He’d never been there. How did he know what drums were? He had never heard any. Where did all that knowledge come from? Who had put it there? Why? What for? How could it be that he knew and understood concepts like 'judgment' and 'penance' and 'agony' when he didn’t even know his own name? And why was his rib cage feeling like someone had cleaved it open with an ax—

_Oh. Because someone did._

_Absalom_. He groaned—or at least that was the most accurate descriptor his brain could put to the sound that crawled back into his ear—at the memory of the name. This one was different. It wasn’t just... _there_... like all this information about the Kingdom of the Dead. This one he had actually _learned_ , in between the unnaturally loud swish of a battle ax and the shouts of hundreds of voices from all around him. Absalom had been the one with the ax. The one who had tried to murder him.

And unless whoever had implanted all his abstract knowledge into his mind had been a filthy liar, unless the Kingdom of the Dead really did feel soft against the skin and warm in his blood, then Absalom had failed.

That was good. It was a start at least.

More memories returned as he forced his eyes open, blinking against the unyielding, glaring light that hit him in a dozen patches of glistening white and red. A long, thin woman, more of a skeleton wearing a skin suit than an actual person really, with long, flaxen, brittle hair, splintered nails and sunken, milky eyes. Another woman, next to her, dark green hair that looked oily and wet at once, like she had drowned in a refuse pit, a sickly, verdant glow to every inch of her charcoal skin, her eyes, and even her rotting teeth. A tall man in armor that seemed to be fused to his skin, a bow that was almost as tall as he was, slung over his shoulder. Another man who seemed to be made of fire, the cracked gray of his skin barely containing the heat that seeped from every fissure, with horns where the others had hair. The pair of sisters, who looked like children, yet radiated an atmosphere of ancient gravity, one of them quiet as a grave to the point where sound seemed to die as soon as it came within spitting distance of her, swallowed up by her mere presence, and the other so fleeting and ethereal in nature that she seemed all but invisible against the rest, like the fevered vision of a dying man. The one who had stood still as a statue and yet had exuded a sense of immediate devastation with every blink of his eyes. The man who had smiled, always smiled, never stopped smiling, to the point where the unnerving grin had haunted him even as he had turned away, burning in the back of his mind like a particularly ugly brand on his brain. The woman who had stood next to him, incessantly talking in words that stopped sounding like an actual language every time they started to make so much as a lick of sense.

And finally, last but by no means least, the one who had looked as if decaying and decayed at the same time, the one whose scythe had blocked his path and reminded him that there was no mercy among his kind, no forgiveness among his brethren. Not for the crime of cowardice. Not for the crime of weakness.

Not among the nephilim.

 _Nephilim_. “Nephilim.” The word tasted strange and familiar at the same time. He knew, somehow, without any proof to support his stance, that this was what he was. It was also what the others had been and that only made him more confused. If he was so different from them, if they would rather have seen him die under Absalom’s ax than lend him a hand, then how could they really be the same species, the same race, the same tribe, the same family?

 _Because we’re not the same_. He grimaced at the realization, another bit of knowledge that just popped into his brain from the ether. They had been the... firstborn... and although he could hazard a guess what that meant based on what his mind knew of the words ‘first’ and ‘born’, and although there was something inside him that urged him to consider the term to be of importance, to be a word to be revered, all he could feel for it was anger and spite. These bastards had been content to let him die. He owed them absolutely zero reverence or even respect.

The next batch of mental images that assaulted him as his eyes finally adjusted to the light were no better. There was a roof above his head that seemed to be made of the pitch-black feathers of some giant bird and it reminded him of what he had seen not all around him, but underneath him as he had tried to evade certain death. Dozens of feathers, dark as a night without stars and sharp as daggers, tips coated in congealing blood and bits of torn flesh, littering the ground to his feet. He recalled the fleeting glance he had gotten at their rightful owner, another female nephilim, who had died with her eyes open in despair and whose shoulder blades had been all but ripped out through her back from the violent defeathering. He recalled the cold feeling of one of those organic blades in his hand. He wasn’t sure what he had been thinking in that moment, if anything at all, except that he hadn’t wanted to die.

And then the ax had hit, which brought him back to the matter at hand.

This time, it was a hiss that forced its way through his lips as he moved to get one hand under the blanket that covered him. Even that left him wincing in agony, so he could take a good guess as to how bad it was. When his fingers finally reached his ribs, however, it was not the squishy wetness of exposed intestines that greeted him, but the thick, almost solid feeling like hundreds of blades of grass plastered upon one another and coated in consolidating grease. His mind struggled to come up with a good word for it and the thought made him snort in amusement. Apparently, whoever had put that knowledge into his brain hadn’t expected him to need medical treatment this badly and this soon.

“Stop.” The voice came from somewhere past his feet, but try as he might to crane his neck and get a glimpse of the source, all he could see were rays of reddish light flooding the room he was in. The shadow the speaker cast on the wall to his left was almost oval and frustratingly featureless. “You’ll only make your injuries worse.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” He remembered now, underneath the searing pain that shot through his bones as he put the slightest bit of pressure on the wound. He remembered how he had dragged himself out of a burning pyre, over a mountain—probably more of a hill, but it had felt like a mountain—and down the other side and then some, while every fiber and sinew in his body had told him to stop moving yesterday. “Won’t be the last.”

The voice laughed, but didn’t come any closer. Whoever it belonged to was clearly in no hurry to save him from himself. He—or was it a she? The voice was low and rough, to the point where any color and nuance in it was overshadowed by the scratching that accompanied every syllable. _It_ whispered something that sounded vaguely like ‘stubborn calf’, leaving him both confused and infuriated. He was not cattle! He was as stubborn as he needed to be and if, no, _when_ he got a hold of whoever had called him that, he would rip out their tongue and feed it to them one finger’s width at a time.

With that thought, he braced his arms against the hard ground beneath him and pushed his torso upright.

He was conscious long enough to make out the fact that everything around him was made of bones and hair, with the skulls of the donors hanging from the walls on either side of the door, before the pain in his ribs shot through him like a burning arrow and sent him back to sleep.

***

The next time he awoke, it was dark all around him, or at least as dark as a hut made of bones could get. Now that he knew what the blankets were made off, he could feel the individual strands of hair scratch against his bare skin, as if subconsciously trying to strangle him. From outside the shack, several raspy voices crept through whatever little fissures they could find in the hut, and he wondered for a moment whether this meant that this was a demonic realm. After all, thanks to that somewhat unsettling repository of inherited knowledge in his head, he knew that creatures in realms aligned with the light usually slept at night and were busy during the day, and vice versa for demonic realms.

Then he realized that the alignment of this world really was the least of his worries.

_‘Tomorrow, Absalom will lead our people that very same way and we will roll over this planet with fire and steel until it is nothing but cold, dead ash.’_

That was what the firstborn with the scythe, the one who had helped him escape from the pyre, had shouted after him as he had crawled up the hill, away from Absalom, from the flames, from death. If this was truly night, then there were only two possible explanations for the chatter outside the hut: either these were the native inhabitants of this world and the nephilim could arrive any minute now or they had already arrived and had decided to wait with whatever they had in store for him until he was actually awake to feel it. Neither was a very comforting thought.

 _I have to get up._ He could feel his body protest, even as he gritted his teeth and rolled over onto his mostly undamaged side. The wound in his left flank sent sharp bursts of fresh agony through his flesh, but he refused to let it consume him again. He had failed once, he would not fail again. He had to find a weapon. He knew he was no match for anyone bare-handed, but if he could get a weapon at least—

It was the sound of hooves and the creaking of the door that made him flinch and turn at the same time, like a cornered snake that was ready to sink its fangs into whoever had come to kill it. Wrapped in nothing but the sheets that had covered him, the metaphor described his maneuverability quite accurately. His left hand reached for something, anything, on the ground that could serve as a weapon, until his fingers clenched into and around something that felt suspiciously like the eye holes in some sort of skull.

The first one was on him no sooner than he had grabbed the bony head and he swung his arm instinctively. Yes, it made the pain in his flank sear anew, but there was no time to worry about that. He retraced the arc his arm had taken in the other direction, effectively hitting his attacker both left and right. Bone connected with flesh, blood spattered onto his face and his exposed shoulders, hot and thick and the smell triggered something inside him beyond the words that had been crammed into him before he had even been born. It made his own blood boil and his muscles tense as the more primal parts of his mind took over. One opponent was down, whimpering in a corner, the second one stood, hesitating and small, just a step away from him, frozen in shock.

And one step was less than the reach of his arm.

He abandoned the skull, as well as the stability of his right arm bracing against the ground, and grabbed the second creature by the neck with both hands. Even has he rolled over a little more to get on top of it, his fingers squeezed tightly, drawing a sound that was halfway between a cry and a bleat from the small throat. Tiny legs thrashed in a panic and the hooves hurt where they hit his arms, but thankfully they did not hit his ribs. Then again, he doubted it would have mattered. He was no longer feeling pain, only the desire to fight, to maim, to kill. It welled up from inside him, steady and strong as a tree growing from the earth, and drowned out what little worry he had had about abandoning his weapon.

Then, something pierced straight through both his arms. Electricity crawled up his veins, both infinitely hot and infinitely cold at the same time, and forced his muscles to unclench. Someone pulled the body—not yet quite dead—out from underneath his convulsing fingers and removed the other creature he had struck down from his reach, before finally, mercifully withdrawing the rod. He fell over almost instantly, curling in on himself to stem the pain and the cry that wanted to come out of his throat. The tears that wanted to well up in his eyes were both pain and anger and he was ready to launch himself against the interloper—and against his best judgment as well—when he finally realized just whom he had attacked.

The door to the outside was wide open now and from the fireplace not too far from it, warm, yellow light flooded the hut. The creature that had speared him stood above him, a sounding staff clenched firmly in both hands. He could feel the mystical energies emanating from the weapon and the cold anger emanating from its wielder. Beneath the flat nose of the horned face, a mouth of tiny, but razor-sharp teeth sneered at him. The voice that followed was the same he had heard before and now, with the raw emotion behind it, he could tell _it_ was in fact a _she_.

“Touch the calves again and I will spear more than your arms.”

 _Calves?_ His gaze wandered to the far side of the room, to where another one of the creatures, this one with horns both on top and on the side of its face, whispered to his two attackers in a language even his pre-taught brain could not decipher. What he could tell was that there was affection in the voice, a steady stream of murmurs, as the old one’s spindly fingers brushed gently over the blood-coated hair on the head he had hit with the skull.

The head of a child.

The child, calf, whatever it could be described as, stared at him with wide, frightened eyes, bleating quietly in between wincing at the elder’s touch and the poultice he—he was pretty sure that one was a _he_ , because the female only had one pair of horns—applied to the wounds. As soon as the treatment was done, the young one fled from the hut as fast as its hooves could carry it.

The second one didn’t even have strength enough left for that. It clung to its elders ropes as if its dear life depended on it, stealing tiny glances at the violent stranger, while doing what he guessed was the equivalent of sobbing for this race. He couldn’t really be sure. He had never heard sobbing. Either way, the elder kept on murmuring, brushing its hair, and patting its little head as he scooped it up and carried it outside of the hut. At last, the female took a step back and lowered the staff.

“You are forgiven, just this once, because unlike them you were not warned,” the female said with thinly veiled hostility, “so I will warn you now: if you touch them again, we will have you for food.”

He waited until she had left the hut and closed the door, blinking in confusion, even as he heard the sound of the door being bolted shut. He wanted to believe that if these had been his children, he would not have been so forgiving, but then he remembered how he had been greeted into this world.

It was not in a nephilim’s nature to be protective. However, it was in their nature to kill indiscriminately.

 _Well_ , he mused as he rolled back onto his bed, fighting the hopeless fight against the tendrils of exhaustion for just a little longer, _at least I am a worthy nephilim in one aspect_.

***

From this point forward, time seemed to pass in its own little hazy dimension, both fast and slow at the same time. On one hand, he felt like days had passed in between his increasingly longer periods of lucidity. On the other hand, it never felt like it was long enough. His sleep was filled with memories of the ax, his waking hours with the stubborn knowledge that the wound was still there. At some point, someone had started leaving him hollowed skulls filled with creamy substance that looked like milk, tasted like bone, and had the consistency of fat, but as disgusting as it seemed to him, at least it halted the rumbling of his stomach that he hadn’t even been aware of until now.

Naturally, now that he knew about it, it only got worse.

Then, someone removed the poultice from his wound.

He hadn’t even been aware of it at first, until he felt the scratchy touch of the blanket against the wound. He pushed the offending fabric away on sheer instinct—demons and angels and consequently nephilim could heal fast, but that didn’t mean infections were not a risk—and stared at the wound in a mix of worry and disgust. Why hadn’t it healed yet? More importantly, what idiot had decided to leave it open for infection?

“The wound is gone.” In the farthest corner of the hut, next to the door, a creature stirred. Upon closer inspection, he realized it was the same elder who had taken care of the calves before. Thick smoke was wafting from the pipe in his hands and from between his thin lips. It smelled stale and somehow cold. “Touch it. Your fingers will come away clean.”

He sincerely doubted that and he was sure the sneer on his face communicated that clearly enough. Still, he braced himself for the pain and moved his right hand slowly to the gaping injury. After all, what did he have to lose?

The hand came back clean. He blinked.

“What in Creation—“

“You possess shape-shifting glamor powers,” the elder explained calmly, as if he hadn’t tried to strangle one of their young not too long ago, “a rather rare gift... even among angels and demons.”

“I’m neither one, nor the other,” he replied almost sulking. He still couldn’t quite believe it and his fingers kept pawing at the wound that wasn’t. This was surreal. “I’m a—“

“Nephilim, yes I know.” The elder spat the word out like it was caked in dirt. “We’ve heard of your kind... and of your deeds.”

“Then you know that you should leave this place. Immediately.” He wasn’t even sure why he was saying that. Sure, there was a chance that the firstborn with the scythe had lied to him, but he had no reason to believe so. More likely than not, something or another had merely delayed the nephilim horde. “My brothers and sisters already wiped out one half of your race. They will be here any hour now. They will not stop until you are all gone.”

“I know.” The elders voice was grim, but unafraid. “We assumed so after the fall of house Khagoth.”

“Then you know you have to leave!” Why did he care? Why should he care? These were not _his_ people. “Take your calves and leave while you still can!”

“No.”

“What?”

“No.”

“They will kill you all.”

“Quite possibly, yes.”

A beleaguered sigh escaped his mouth. This old fool was hopeless.

“Such is the way of all things that live. We are proud and strong, until someone prouder and stronger comes along. Worlds are born, flourish, and then fall into the Abyss. It is the way of all things.”

He scoffed at that. “And you will just sit here and let it happen, will you? While hosting the enemy in your own home, no less? Or do you think I would make a good hostage?”

The thought made him laugh. He could just picture it in his mind. The exasperation in the face of the one with the scythe. The bellowing laughter of Absalom. The grins on the others as they would first kill the ‘hostage’, then trample their real targets into the dust.

“I think they left you to die,” was the answer he finally got, and despite his best attempts, he froze. “I think you are pathetically weak for a nephilim. And it is the custom of my people to shelter the weak, even if they belong to those who would wish harm upon us. To deny aid to those who need it is considered a grave sin among my kind.”

“A miracle then that no-one has wiped you out yet,” he spat back. There was a tiny part of him that appreciated not having been left for dead. The rest of him felt repulsed. He was a nephilim. He shouldn’t have needed help. They shouldn’t have helped him. He’d be dead as soon as the horde found him. All he had earned was a stay of execution and this time he doubted death would come so quickly.

“My kind don’t believe in miracles,” the elder finally said. “But we do believe in hard work.” The robe the elder tossed him was plain and coarse, little more than a big round sheet with a hole for his head and two for his arms. It was spun of the same hair as the blanket that had covered him for the last few days and yet it seemed a dozen times heavier. Against his dark skin, the brownish-red looked more like copper than earth. “Put this on and follow me.” To his surprise, the elder was on his feet in the blink of an eye. “You have much to learn and very little time.”

He wanted to argue, although he wasn’t even sure why. Perhaps just for the sake of arguing. Rage and discord came easier to him than compliance and he wondered if that too was part of his demonic heritage. Then again, nephilim were half angels, too, were they not? And angels always followed orders, if his memory served him right.

He sighed, prodded the wound once more to be absolutely sure that there was nothing there, slipped into the robe, and rose from his bed.

The hut was barely big enough for him to stand in and he had to duck as he went through the door. Outside, a white sun was setting behind a mountain range, while a red sun followed in its wake. About twenty paces and a well-trodden path from the hut, a much larger structure of bone, skin, and hair rose from the muddy ground. In front of it, another male of the species stoked a small fire. Crude benches circled the fireplace in two rings, one just high enough to reach a calf’s knees, the other high enough to reach his. The ivory skull of a horned creature watched over the camp from above the door to the building and two dark red banners framed its sides. Each one was emblazoned with a symbol in the vague shape of an elongated, thick, jagged cross. Vertically along its center ran a set of runes that he could neither recognize nor decipher.

“This is the sigil of the house of Etu-Goth,” the elder explained, as if he had read his mind. He paused in front of the door, cleared out his pipe, and made it vanish in his own cloak. “Ours is a noble house and the power of magic runs strong in our veins.”

He could barely suppress his laughter. “And _this_ is where the noble house of powerful magic users lives? Out in the fields, like shepherds, in a house that looks more suited to be a tavern than a residence?”

“Our beginnings are humble and so shall be our ends.” For a moment, the elder folded his bony hands as if in prayer, one against his heart, the other reaching for his forehead with his finger tips. “Structures like these are where we are born and where we remain until our talents show. Then we are sent to live with the leaders of our houses, in settlements far larger than you can imagine.”

“Settlements that my brothers and sisters have likely turned to dust by now.” He tried not to sound too gleeful about it. He actually wasn’t.

“Likely so, yes,” the elder agreed, “at least that would explain why they have not arrived here, yet.” He paused for a moment, stroking his long beard as if he had lost his train of thought. Then a sudden thought seemed to strike him. “As you can undoubtedly tell, I am no calf anymore. When my kind grow old and our strength and magics start to wane, we retreat back to these outposts, to care for our young and to prepare for the end of our own days.”

“Our beginnings are humble and so shall be our ends,” he repeated and the old one nodded.

“You learn quickly. That is good!” For the first time since the beginning of their conversation, a genuine warmth had risen into the elder’s voice. “My name is Reü. Glamors are not my specialty, but Daragh will tell you more. I will introduce you to her.”

“Why?” He had to ask. Not just because he wanted to be difficult, although if he was being honest with himself, he enjoyed the spark of exasperation every one of his interruptions brought to the old man’s eyes. Mostly, he was genuinely confused. “Surely explaining magics to me goes beyond helping a stranger in need.” Also, it was in every nephilim’s nature to be suspicious. A gift from the demons. And the angels, too, the more he thought about it.

“It does, yes.” The el—Reü nodded. “And we did indeed spend much time discussing how far to extend our... hospitality to a brother of those who are slaughtering us. Especially after you attacked two of our calves.”

“I wouldn’t have, if I had been lucid enough to know they were children.” He protested. “Probably.”

“These will be our last days,” Reü said, with what actually sounded like genuine sadness. “The warriors of house Khagoth were the strongest of us. If they have fallen—and we know that they have, for we lost all communication with them days ago—then there is little that the other houses will be able to achieve. We will die. But before we die, we get to decide how to spend what little time is left to us and we have chosen not to run. Our end will not be one of cowardice. For those of us to young or too old, it will not be one of battle either. But compassion?” He folded his hands in prayer again. “Compassion is something that all of us are capable of, no matter how young or old, how weak or strong. Now come. It is not wise to keep Daragh waiting.”

Daragh turned out to be the same female who had speared him through his arms. Of course she did. He just had the best of luck. He could tell from the look in her eyes and the grip on her staff that she had not yet completely done away with the idea of killing him. Also, word of his... transgressions... had evidently spread quickly. Although he could hear several tiny bleats as he followed Reü to the end of the house, he did not see a single calf. What he did see were a host of elders, males with incredibly long horns and even longer beards, and females with braids long enough to touch the ground, who eyed him in suspicion and bitterness while doing their best to hide whatever, or whomever, was behind them.

Daragh’s face twisted into expressions of half a dozen different emotions, before settling on mild annoyance. “You have survived. Ancestors be praised.”

“Yes, I’m sure they are thrilled.” He wanted to roll his eyes. He had no doubt this woman still wanted to skin him alive.

“What is your name?”

“My—“ He had expected many things. An angry tirade. Another warning. Chastising for his disrespect. But this? ‘ _And if you don’t have a name by then, he will kill you,_ ’ the scythe-wielding nephilim’s voice echoed in his mind. “I don’t have one. Yet.”

At that, Daragh seemed genuinely surprised. Murmurs erupted around them. She shook her head softly and sighed. “Such barbarians. Very well. We shall call you Beäguan, then.”

That elicited a soft choir of laughter from the surrounding creatures. For a moment, he felt the temptation to break the faces of every single one of them.

But what would he do after that? Wait for the nephilim to show up and find him still as weak and nameless as before? That wouldn’t do.

He swallowed his disappointment and pushed the blood-thirst down. “Call me whatever you want. It won’t stick.”

“No, it won’t.” She caught his meaning easily enough. Everyone in this room was going to die soon enough. Potentially even he, though he was kin to those who brought the destruction. “Do you know how to control your glamor?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to use a weapon? Any weapon?”

“Of course I—“

Yes, sure he knew. The knowledge was implanted in his mind, basic as it was. How to swing a sword, a mace, a hammer. How to hold a shield and throw a spear. How to shoot something with either bow or gun. Even how to tear someone limb from limb, bone from bone with his bare hands. All that and more had been imprinted, ingrained in his very being even before he had crawled from that cocoon to face Absalom’s ax, but the only time he had ever wielded a weapon, he had not even managed to draw blood before nearly getting slaughtered himself.

He hated to admit it, but there was no point denying it. He was too weak. Yet.

_‘Our beginnings are humble and so shall be our ends. Structures like these are where we are born and where we remain until our talents show.’_

He swallowed hard enough to swallow his pride. “I know all the techniques and none of the strength.”

For once, Daragh neither seemed contemptuous nor amused with him. The seriousness written over her features made it nigh impossible to tell her apart from what he imagined the warlords of this race must have looked like.

“Then we will teach you under one condition: you must not use the knowledge we impart to harm one of us.”

His first reaction was ‘no’. His second was ‘hold on, idiot’. It was as reasonable an expectation as one could get, especially considering that he had already very nearly killed two of the calves. And what was he going to kill them for anyway? It wasn’t like he had any intention to gain the approval of his blood-crazed siblings. He would be content enough not getting slaughtered. And he would have to pay back Absalom for nearly killing him. That alone should be enough to show that he had gotten strong enough, shouldn’t it?

“Deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Darksiders II, Death does not know about the true functioning of the Kingdom of the Dead and the Tree of Life/Death. In the Abomination Vault, he does. My guess is that the nephilim were initially aware of most of it, but the Charred Council took that knowledge from the riders, just as they took the knowledge of how to create the nephilim from Lilith.
> 
> When meeting Ostegoth in Darksiders 2, he reacts to Death's question about what he is with a slight laugh and the remark that his people are long dead and forgotten... even by those who destroyed them.
> 
> "Beäguan" is a combination of the Irish words for "little" and "lamb".


	3. The Difference Between Thinking And Knowing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strife's tutelage under Daragh has begun. However, what sounded easy soon becomes complicated and time is running out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I have written more than 600k of whump and H/C and I've done some truy awful things to my beloved characters before, but this chapter nearly killed me. There's just something really awful about writing doomed characters.

“A rather spectacular failure. Try again.”

He wanted to strangle her. Instead, he rubbed his aching toes and silently cursed whatever stroke of bad luck had cursed him with his shape-shifting glamor. Daragh had not hit him hard enough to break his bones and make them stick out through his flesh, although it certainly felt like it, and it was precisely because of this feeling that his body had helpfully decided to make it look like that as well. He could see the spots where the skin burst to reveal the dirty white of splintered bone and so could Daragh. A perfect illusion.

A perfect proof that he could still not control his abilities.

It was frustrating, although that was not what bothered him the most. It was the knowledge that he was living on borrowed time, that every minute now his Nephilim brethren could roll over this tiny village with fire and steel and he would be able to do nothing about it except die.

“What’s the point?” He wasn’t aware that he had even voiced the thought out loud until Daragh looked at him in confusion. There was the typical undertone of condescension in her voice as she repeated the question back at him and before he knew it his fist had come down hard on the bench to his right, cracking it in two. He felt the briefest hint of joy at the trivial destruction, before frustration took hold again. “We have been at this for three days and I am not improving. At all. Time is running out. What’s the point?”

Daragh smiled. He almost took a step back in shock. Over the last three days he had seen her frustrated, angry, tired, aloof, and even sad, but never happy. Not even when talking to the calves.

Maybe she was slowly going insane in her old age. He was just about to lob the comment at her when she got up from her seat. Just for a moment he could see a tremor going through her as she clutched her staff, a tiny hint of pain on her face.

That, too, made her smile. “You just saw it, didn’t you?”

“The trembling or the pain?”

“Both.” And just like that, both were gone. Daragh stood tall and proud.

_ Too tall. Too proud.  _ He narrowed his eyes. This time, he did actually take a step back. “You are using a glamor right now.”

Daragh laughed. Then, with a shake of her head that sent the thick, white braids with the thin purple threads in them tumbling over her shoulder, she tapped her staff against the ground twice.

The vision in front of him rippled, subtly at first, like the soft swimming of edges veiled by scorching hot air, then stronger, like the ripples from a stone thrown into a lake, until it finally fell away like a shed coat of feathers. Gone were the thick, white braids and the gleaming blue of her eyes and the straight, proud, shoulders-squared posture of a powerful magician. What remained was an old woman, shorter than Reü and pretty much any other adult Gothar he had ever met, with narrow, hunched shoulders, hands and fingers thin as twigs and mottled with the brown streaks that symbolized severely old age in her species. What remained was a tangled mess of ashen strands that looked more like spider webs in between the thick, purple strings of wool and pearl that signified her ascension to the highest sorcerer rank her race had ever known. What remained where two milky eyes, blind with old age, set in a face that more closely resembled old, rotting bark.

“Not what you were expecting, I’d imagine,” Daragh said wryly, and suddenly her voice sounded like the scratch of the bone-made tools Arissa used for treating leather. “I must admit I mostly reserve this look for scaring the little ones.”

“I bet you do.” He could imagine it was very effective. Gothar younglings, he had come to learn over the last three days, were relentlessly curious, but also unbelievably skittish and very, very easily frightened. Unfortunately for his ears, they were also extremely vocal about it.

He could only hope that none of his brethren actually enjoyed the terrified screaming and crying of weak, panicked prey.

“So...” He watched closely as the vision in front of him swam again. One moment, it looked like nothing was happening; the next, Daragh looked her usual self once more. “Which one is your true self?”

“What do you believe?”

He rolled his eyes. He had seen that question coming from a mile away and yet it still infuriated him. “You think I would be asking you if I knew the truth, old hag?”

Daragh shook her head. “Truth is not what I’m asking for, Beäguan.”

_ O Creator save me _ _! _ He had an idea where this was going and it made him feel ready to punch or kick something else out of sheer frustration. “I’m not interested in a philosophical debate over whether there even is something like ‘truth’.”

“Good, because you would have to go to someone else for that.” She tapped her staff against the bench once, then held it in place as her magic did its assigned task and carefully reassembled the broken pieces, splinter by splinter. When it was done, the bench seemed as good as new. Daragh looked at him and gestured at his hand. “How is your hand feeling?”

“Fine?” He looked at the appendage in question despite knowing that he could not trust his senses. Not when his own magic was playing games with him constantly. Still, aside from the bruises he had earned from yesterday’s lesson, his hand looked just fine.

“See, that is what you  _believe_.” Daragh shook her head and this time, despite the fact that she looked her usual self again, he could not help but see the purple bands in her hair as much thicker than before. “If I asked you to take up a bow and arrow right now and go out to hunt, what would you do?”

“I would ask you whether sending me out to hunt with nothing but a bow in the middle of the afternoon when the only creatures roaming this land are massive monstrosities that would use arrows for toothpicks is a not so subtle attempt to rid yourself of me.”

“But still, would you do it?”

He thought about the question for another moment. As much as he hated it, part of his deal with the Gothar of house Etu-Goth had been to follow instructions without question, and even though the only creatures roaming about at this time out-classed a bow and arrow, the smaller prey had not just vanished. He could find their nests. Smoke them out. Get away with the catch before he got into trouble. He had done it before, with Shivvan. He could probably do it on his own.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Good.” That was all the warning he got before Daragh threw her staff into his hands and he barely caught it. Something was wrong. Daragh never gave up her staff. To anyone. “Grip it hard. Grip it like you would grip a bow.”

He wasn’t sure where this was going, but he did it anyway. The staff pulsed and trembled in his hand, almost as if it was resisting the sudden change of ownership, yet he could feel the magic flowing through it, the calming, stabilizing affect it had on the turmoil that raged somewhere deep inside him. Daragh had said his own magic was unfocused and wild, so that was no surprise. He did as she told and tightened his grip. Nothing happened.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” At that, Daragh reached out and he handed the staff back to her immediately. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Not tell. Show.” She pointed at the formerly broken bench. “Look closer. Look as close as you can. Shivvan tells me you have remarkable sight. You should be able to spot it.”

He did. It took him only two seconds of intently staring at the bench to realize what was wrong. “It’s missing a few splinters.”

“Yes.” Daragh nodded. “They broke off when you smashed it with your fist. Where do you think they went?”

“Well, either the ground or—” But there was nothing on the ground. He could see every speck of dirt underneath and around the bench and there were no splinters of wood there. Worms and tiny roots and the occasional insect with way too many legs for comfort, but no splinters of wood. And that left only one place.

Suddenly, his fist was on fire. He shook it out as if trying to throw off the pain, then looked at it once more. Suddenly, they were there—tiny little spears of rich brown wood, embedded in his knuckles and his fingers, drawing blood at every angle. He picked at them one by one, checking to see if they were really there or just another sick joke of his glamor, then removed and discarded them.

“We could not see that you were injured, because you did not  _believe_  that you were injured. You believed that you were unharmed so much that it became something you _knew_ , a truth to you, even though it was not.”

“You said ‘we’,” he cut in quickly, “yet you didn’t really seem all that surprised to find I have a fist full of splinters. You _knew._ ”

“Of course I did.” She smiled again. “I have been dealing with this brand of magic for more than two million years, by my species’ reckoning. How old is the eldest nephilim?”

That actually gave him pause. How old  _was_  Absalom? It wasn’t part of the memories that had been given to him upon his creation and somehow he doubted he could just ask him, if he ever survived reuniting with his kin. There was only one thing he was sure of. “Less than two million years, definitely.”

“Very definitely. And remember that I am not the one who tried to kill you.”

“You could have fooled me.” At last, he had finished plucking the splinters out of his knuckles.

“You could spend a million years trying to subdue your powers and he would still manage to see through you and kill you,” Daragh continued. “You could spend a million years trying to control them through your conscious thoughts and you would still die. True _knowledge_ lies beyond and beneath conscious thought. It does not require effort. It does not require concentration. It requires you to understand that you, and only you, are both your greatest ally and your greatest enemy. It is not something that needs to be learned, but something you possess. You had this shape-shifting gift from the moment you drew breath and it needs to become just as natural to you as breathing, as natural as looking at the ground beneath the bench and seeing that there are no splinters in the earth.”

“Great advice, Daragh!” The sound that came out of his mouth was halfway between a laugh and a hiss. “You make that sound  _so_  easy...”

“It won’t be,” Daragh admitted with a shrug. “But now that you know the difference between thinking and _knowing_ , I’m sure your stubbornness will get you there.” She took a deep breath and turned around to head back inside. “Your magic lessons are over. You are Shivvan’s problem now.”

“What?!” Keeping up with her was easy. Even when she did look like a sorceress in her prime, Daragh moved with the speed of an ancient witch. Still, he knew that he might as well be talking to a wall long before they even entered the house. “What do you mean ‘my magic lessons are over’?”

“Over. Finished. Completed.” Daragh snorted. “From here on out, it is all practice, and practice is all on you. Shivvan!”

The crowd of Gothar children that had been playing a game of tag just beyond the door dispersed the instant they entered. For Daragh they made way out of respect. For him, they made way out of fear. Most of them at least.

“Look at these two!” Daragh pointed her staff at the pair of calves that had refused to scuttle away. _Nessa and Imru_ , his brain helpfully provided. They all looked the same to him, even after three days, but he had learned to tell them apart by their behaviors. Nessa was the one who was always much too curious for her own health, but somehow had enough dumb luck to get away with only scratches and bruises each time. Imru was the one who constantly begged Shivvan to let him join in on a hunt. Even though his knowledge of the Gothar language was abysmal, he was fairly certain that the children of house Etu-Goth had a bet going on amongst themselves, about who could get closest to the scary stranger without getting strangled. “One of them _thinks_ he’s brave. The other one _knows_ she is.”

From the back of the room, the familiar patter of a slightly limping hooved step gradually got louder. The Gothar who stepped out of the shadows looked old and frail, thin as a stick at first glance, but he knew better. He had seen him in action before. Shivvan could be fast and deadly if he wanted. Not for too long, but long enough to hunt efficiently. He watched as they exchanged their customary greeting, Shivvan touching his left hand lightly to Daragh’s shoulder and receiving the same pat in return. It indicated familiarity mingled with respect; that much he had learned by now. If _he_ had tried to touch anyone’s shoulder, if he tried to even so much as touch someone’s hand, he’d lose his fingers. At least.

“Take Beäguan for a hunt, will you? Give him Mercy.”

“What?!” This time, it was not just his voice asking the question. Shivvan looked at him with an amused smile that vanished instantly, then turned to Daragh.

“Are you sure you want him to have Mercy?” Shivvan did not sound convinced.

“I’m sure none of us will have much use for it soon,” Darah replied bitterly. “Let it become a relic of our people, to honor us after we are gone.”

“More importantly, are you sure you really don’t want me dead?” He had assumed that she had been joking about sending him out to hunt, or perhaps merely making a point, but apparently he had been wrong.

“There’s a storm coming,” Shivvan said with a nod. “It will be difficult to hunt in a pair. Let me at least pick a third hunter to come along.”

“Take Imru,” she pointed her staff at the calf who had been trying and failing to sneak up on them. He had ignored him, knowing that he was no danger to anyone, yet now ignoring him became impossible. Gothar calves had no concept of ‘indoor voices’. “He’s been begging for it for weeks now.” Even though Imru did not understand any language other than the native tongue of the Gothar, he was smart enough to put one and two together. The instant he realized Daragh was volunteering him for a hunt, a frightened bleat escaped his tiny mouth. Daragh sighed and turned around to face him.

It was mildly amusing to watch them, even though he did not understand the words they spoke to one another. Daragh was a force to be reckoned with, not because she could become raging and loud in her anger, but because every word she spoke sounded like it was the final verdict of some ancient deity that defied discussion. She was certainly much more entertaining to watch when he was not on the receiving end of her lectures. As the conversation dragged on, Shivvan shuffled off to the back of the house, to the locked room in the corner where the bows and arrows hung neatly from raised hooks, safely out of reach of the calves. He followed him without a word and reached for the bow he had used last time, only to receive a gentle tap on the hand.

“Not today.” Instead, Shivvan pointed at the long, wooden box that sat on top of the rack of bows and arrows. “You take that one.”

“Because you can’t even reach up there anymore?” He couldn’t help it. Yes, now Shivvan was angry with him. No, he did not care. Perhaps his habit of constantly antagonizing every single creature that crossed his path was just part of being a nephilim. Even so, he still complied.

The box, old and battered as it was, felt heavy in his hand and made the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. He could feel the faint glow of magic emanating from within, which only made his surprise upon seeing the actual content more profound.

It was a gun, a revolver to be precise, with four intricately-carved barrels that made the weapon look way too front-heavy and unbalanced for its tiny handle, yet once he held it, the pistol was light as a feather and perfectly balanced. The metal it was made of was strangely warm to the touch and couldn’t quite seem to decide whether it wanted to look like aged ivory or dirty steel. It seemed familiar and alien at the same time.

“Adamantine,” Shivvan said softly, as if he had read his mind. “A rare metal, used by many Old Ones and the First and Second Kingdom to enhance and strengthen weapons and talismans.”

“This wasn’t just strengthened.” The weapon _felt_ old, yet he could not see a single blemish on it. Now that it rested in his hand, he could feel the power that flowed through it, similar to Daragh’s staff and yet vastly different. However, it was a consistent flow of power. Unchanging. Unhampered by material of lesser quality. “This one is pure adamantine, is it not?”

“Well-spotted.” Shivvan strapped his quiver to his back and handed him a belt with a holster. “It’s worth more than all other weapons in this house combined. Do not lose it.”

“I thought the Gothar do not practice sedentary trades? You know... farming, smithing...”

He had learned that much about his hosts to his great astonishment. It seemed like a completely unsustainable way for anyone to live, especially a species that wasn’t proactively trying to conquer the galaxy like his own kind did, but according to house Etu-Goth, everything worked out just fine. The Gothar lent their strength to other Old Ones they were allied with, fighting their battles pretty much anywhere but on their own home world, and traded their service for anything they could not gain from hunting. It was the main reason why the house of merchants, house Ostegoth, was held in such great esteem, even though they could not fight to save their lives.

“This weapon was forged by the Makers themselves,” Shivvan explained as they headed back to the entrance. “It was a gift received by one of our ancestors for saving a Maker child from a rampaging construct. It never runs out of ammunition and it never needs reloading. The drawback is that it is only ever as accurate as the sight of its wielder.”

That at least explained why Shivvan was handing it to him, rather than using it himself. For all his skills as a hunter, Shivvan was old and his body was getting weaker every day. Not that it mattered at this hour.

By the time they got back to the door, Daragh had disappeared. Imru stood by the closest pillar, nervously hopping from one hoof onto the other and looking positively tiny in his water-proof hunter’s coat. He tried complaining just once more, as if Shivvan was more likely to grant him mercy than Daragh, before being shooed out the door.

Shivvan had been right. A storm had been coming. Now it was here and the torrential downpour of cold water caused the Imru to launch an angry tirade of childish insults against the heavens as they started their trek south into the marshes. Shivvan went first and despite the gradual deterioration of the ground around them into nothing but thick, cold mud and treacherously deep puddles, the going was easy as ever. A quick look at Shivvan’s hooves confirmed what he had guessed: Shivvan was using his magic to freeze every square foot he touched, turning sludge and swamp water into almost solid ground that crunched under their steps and dissolved back into liquid form soon after they had passed. There were no tracks. For all anyone would know, no Gothar had entered the swamp, much less a nephilim.

However, that did not mean that they were alone.

The first clue was a host of blood-covered feathers, drifting in the tangled roots of a gnarly old tree. He plucked one from the water carefully—disturbing the swamp was decidedly not a good idea—and swiped off the blood. Underneath, the feather was a bright vermillion in color, broken up only by the tiniest of individual strands of deep brown. He could see them clearly, despite the mist rising from the waters and the clouds and trees blocking out the red sun that should have stood high in the sky. “Yellow-chest. And a young one at that.”

“Unusual.” Shivvan stroked his beard as he relayed the information to Imru. He sounded calm, but something felt off. Somewhere, underneath the steadiness of Shivvan’s voice, he could feel more than hear the slight delay of confusion. Yellow-breasts dwelt in tree tops, far out of reach of any swamp creature. Whatever had slain them was either very tall or could climb trees. Shivvan drew his bow and proceeded forward cautiously.

They continued their trek for the better part of another hour, pausing only briefly every now and then for Shivvan to teach Imru how to send a spark of glowing magic light into the swamp to attract the prey lurking beneath the surface, but no good came of it. The swamp did not stir. The trees were silent. He didn’t like it one bit. Something was wrong. He kept one hand near the gun’s grip and braced himself for running straight into trouble.

In the end, trouble ran into them. Literally.

It all happened in a span of seconds. First, the leaves of the trees around them trembled from the sound of a roar loud enough to make his ears ring. Then, the trunks of the thicket to their left split apart like tooth picks, sending splinters of pale bark flying fast enough to embed themselves in the nearby foliage with the ferocity of nails under a hammer. He ducked into cover just in time and so did Shivvan. He pulled Imru with him, casting a spell that quickly stopped the frightened bleating that was about to bubble up from the calf.

_ Good. _ The last thing he needed now was for someone to give away their position. He drew Mercy and glanced around the tree he was stuck behind quickly to get a glimpse of their attacker. What he saw made no sense. He silently mouthed the words ‘how the hell’ to Shivvan, but only got a headshake in return.

That was very definitely a raptor from the plains and he had no idea what in the name of Creation it was doing here in the swamp. It was too tall to maneuver efficiently and too heavy not to sink into the ground. Unfortunately, it was also a creature of incredible stamina and strength with three rows of razor-sharp teeth and equally strong claws on each of its limbs, not to mention to many eyes than anything on four legs should have and poison spikes on its back that kept the giant vultures of the plains at bay. However, the most dangerous part of it was undoubtedly that damn tail that cut down trees like they were blades of grass.

Shivvan motioned for Imru to stay behind the tree, then readied two of his arrows for a double shot. He spoke the words of power even as he stepped from hiding spot, drawing the attention of the raptor to himself in an instant. The slick ground was not the only thing that made its movements much clumsier than the solid grounds of the plains would have allowed. An arrow of dark gleaming metal was stuck above its right hip and the wound was sprouting blood and pus with every step the raptor took. In about four seconds, it was about to be the least concerning projectile for the creature.

Shivvan’s first arrow landed to the right side of its feet, the second to its left. The moment both were in the ground, his magic brought the vines and roots of every nearby tree out of the swamp and crawling around the creature’s legs. It slashed and clawed at them with all its might, but still fell to the ground with a splash that would have drenched Shivvan in muddy, leech-filled water had he not cast a shield around himself. Another set of vines coiled around the raptor’s throat and head, dragging it beneath the surface. Its struggles intensified for a few long minutes as it thought for its life, before its body went limp.

“Good thing you’ve got magic.”

“Good thing it was only one,” Shivvan corrected. “A plains raptor in the swamps!” He stared at the arrow sticking out from the creature’s hip with blatant disgust. “Whoever shot it first had magic as well. Dark, unholy magic.”

“I’ll get it for you then.” He had a dreadful suspicion where this was going. He hoped he was wrong. Still, if it was what he thought, he would be the one least likely to suffer from it.

Upon closer inspection, the arrow was made entirely of metal, darker than adamantine, but equally tough, down to the feathers at its end. It was almost scathingly hot when he first touched it, but soon turned colder with every inch he pulled out of the raptor. It was stuck deep and took a significant chunk of festering flesh with it as he removed it. Shivvan was right. He could feel the flow of magic through it, from the feathers down to the tip, which was still inside the beast.

Down to the dead creature.

No sooner had he yelled “get back” than Shivvan’s shield—‘Aegis’, he had called the spell—went back up and not a second too late. The raptor’s head rose from the swamp with incredible speed, slamming into Shivvan’s shield and knocking him back, followed by the rest of it clawing its way out of the water. He rolled off its back with the arrow still in hand and had to duck twice to avoid the thrashing tail as it turned more trees into driftwood. Then, it focused its attention to the right.

He knew why even before he looked. He knew even in spite of Shivvan’s magic that had silenced the frightened calf.

There was no time to think. The thought of whether he could do this entered his brain for a fraction of a second and he shoved it right back off the cliffs of consciousness and into Oblivion. He could do this. He _would_ do this.

He drew Mercy and unloaded a salve of deafening shots onto the raptor. It did barely slowed the beast down. With a frown, he aimed for the trunk of the tree just to the right of Imru until it was more thoroughly perforated than the sieves the Gothar used for filtering the waters of the rivers west of the village. It listed heavily to the side, creaking as what little of the trunk remained tried to sustain the wait of the crown, trailing its vines over the raptor. He grabbed the arrow, now minus its tip, jammed it hard into the monster’s side, and climbed atop its back to reach for one of the vines, nestled between the poison spikes. Then, he braced himself against the other side of the raptor’s spine and pulled.

The tree fell with a loud groan and an ear-splitting crack as it crushed the raptor’s backbone. He ducked in time to avoid both the falling tree and the falling foe, but ended up taking a dive into the swamp instead. Dirty mud filled his mouth and the water burned like fire in his throat. He wouldn’t have known where up or down was, except that the vines and roots kept trying to pull him down, until they suddenly recoiled in tremors. A moment later, two hands wrapped around his right arm and pulled sharply.

The air stung no less than the water had as it finally reached his lungs again, which was strange because somehow he knew that he could not drown. No demon could. Neither could nephilim. In a way, that only made it worse. Hell knew how long it would have taken him to die down there then. He coughed out the rest of the mud and wrung out his clothes as best as he could, before picking a bunch of leeches that had thought of him as an easy meal off his face, neck and arms.

Somehow, despite all of this, despite being drenched, his hair remained floating from the back of his head and the thought made him laugh. Apparently, nephilim, or parts of them, could even defy the laws of nature on occasion.

“Are you alright, friend?”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone call me that.”

He coughed out another lump of mud as he got to his feet and noticed to his surprise that Mercy was back in its holster. He had no idea when he had put it back there, but it must have been before he had climbed the oversized, reanimated, carnivorous reptile.

An oversized, reanimated, carnivorous reptile that he had brought down on his own. Without his glamor. Without any help. Probably a small feat for a nephilim, but he banished that thought as well.

To his left, Imru clung to Shivvan, a little bundle of silent shivers and fear. He raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you lift the spell from him already?”

“Are you sure you want to hear him bleat in your ear until we get back?”

_ Good point. _ “No. This is fine.”

Nothing was fine, though. He returned to the carcass and removed the arrow once more. This time, it came out without trouble, what with the head still stuck in its hip. The magic that had flowed through it was gone, but he remembered how it had felt. He remembered what it had caused.

“Gothar don’t practice necromancy, do they?”

“Absolutely not!” Shivvan sounded offended at the very suggestion. “Humble are our beginnings and so shall be our ends. It is not our place to argue with death.”

_ But I have a feeling death will soon argue with you _ . He didn’t say it out loud, but he doubted he would have too. Shivvan knew. All the elderly Gothar knew. And the calves… Well, according to Daragh, some of the older ones who had learned to use more than just spark light magic had started impatiently asking why they could not go to the city and start training for real. “Will you butcher this one for meat?”

“Only to show Imru how to do it properly, but no Gothar will feast on the flesh of this poisoned creature.”

He nodded. “Then I’ll go check on the plains.”

He started walking without waiting for a reply. Granted, going barefoot through a swamp all on his own was not the brightest idea, but so long as he stuck to the trees, he had some halfway solid ground to walk on at least. Normally, it should have been a trek of a full hour.

He got there in less than half that time and really wished he hadn’t. One moment, the swamp and its thicket were there, the next it was simply gone.

Everything was gone.

The grass of the plains had been turned to cold, gray ash that reached as high as his thighs. The hills in the distance had been razed. The wind that howled across the desolate wasteland was void of any scent. Void of life. As far as he could see—and his eyes could see far—there was nothing left. Absolutely nothing. In his gut, dread curled into a cold ball that made his ribs ache once more. There was knowing that the day was going to come, thinking about it, and then there was _knowing_ that the day was going to come. Daragh had been right. There was a difference.

Whatever spark of triumph he had felt at slaying the raptor evaporated as he turned around and went back the way he had come. By the time he reached the fallen beast, Imru and Shivvan had cut long strips of meat from its flanks and laid them out in the usual fashion. He could only assume that his face was as grim as his mood, because neither of the two Gothar even tried so much as say a word to him as they cleaned up their hunting knives and headed back home.

They travelled in silence and the two hours back to the village felt like the longest two hours he had ever known, longer even than the training with Daragh, longer than the nights he’d spend lying in his hut, trying and failing to cut his own arms and mask the wounds with his glamor. Longer than that time he had dragged himself out of his own pyre and up a hill while closer to death than life. Only once the village was back in sight did Shivvan lift the spell he had placed on Imru and for the first time ever he appreciated the ear-piercing sound of a calf bleating in terror and excitement as he ran for his home, no doubt eager to report of the adventure they had had and then cry some more about how scary it had been. For all the hunting that he had wanted to do, for all the enthusiasm he had shown, Imru was still nothing more than a scared little calf.

A soon to be dead scared little calf.

_ Not your kin. Not your concern. Don’t think about it. _ He repeated the words in his head as he walked to his hut and switched into a fresh new cloak that was not drenched in swamp water and blood. Once he was done picking the remaining leeches he had missed off his skin and discarding them, he slung the belt and holster back around his hips and returned to the fireplace at the center of the village.

He hadn’t even realized how dark it had become outside, between the sunset and the storm, but now that he stood in front of the magical dome Daragh had created to keep the fire and the community safe from the elements, he felt nearly blinded. The softly glowing shield reflected the rain that pelted against it with incessantly loud pattering, yet it let him pass through with only the softest of sounds. Inside, the fire was louder than the rain.

He took his seat next to Reü, as he had for the last three days and thanked him for the bowl of soup and the skewer of meat he was handed, but ended up barely nibbling on them. Even if he had been hungry before—and he hadn’t been, because as it turned out his kind needed surprisingly little food or sleep—he would have lost his appetite by now.

And of course, Daragh picked up on it instantly.

“Shivvan told us what you found. You can stop sulking about it. We all knew this day would come.”

“Did he tell _all_ of you?” He couldn’t help the derisive tone his words held. He wasn’t sure if he would have wanted to. “The calves as well?” He nodded towards the little ones and was not the least bit surprised when most of them flinched and retreated from him just a little. Yes, the big scary stranger had likely become a lot less scary every time Daragh went on about how hopeless he was, but he supposed having killed one of the larger predators of the plains by bringing an entire tree down on it without any magic had probably reversed a fair deal of that. “Do they know they’re going to die soon?”

“No.” Daragh took another bite and muttered something he didn’t understand, but that he was fairly certain was an insult as well. She always gave what she got. “And we, the elders of house Etu-Goth, have decided that we won’t tell them, either. They should spend their last days in happiness, free of worries and sorrow.”

Yet sorrow was exactly what this was going to end in. There was nothing he could do about it. He looked at the bowl in his hand—dead meat—at the calves seated on the lower benches—soon to be dead meat—and finally at Shivvan. “I still have to return Mercy.”

“Keep it. As a gift.”

“It won’t be enough to save you. Not even in my hand.”

He was not entirely sure where he had misstepped, yet misstepped he had. He could tell by the way that Daragh rose without a sound and walked over to him wordlessly. For a few, long moments, she merely towered over him, fixating him with a glare that could have melted iron. Then, her staff came down hard against the back of his head. He wondered briefly whether it just felt wet and hurt like hell because he thought it was bleeding, but then he caught sight of the tiny droplet of blood it had left on her staff. _Definitely bleeding._

“Beäguan... first of all, I am tiring of calling you that. You killed a raptor of the plains today. You are certainly no calf and you had better make a name for yourself before your brothers get here. Secondly, if I see you wield Mercy against your own kin and get killed for it, I will haunt you through the Dead Plains and the City of the Dead, right down into the Well of Souls, if need be! We did not show you compassion for you to squander it so carelessly.”

She returned to her seat and her food before he had time to react. All around him, the elders nodded. Reü shook his head in what he could only interpret as amusement, then started talking to the calves, most likely to translate what had just been said. The distinct urge to strangle Daragh for insulting him again welled up inside him once more, but he pushed it down in resignation. Perhaps it was past due time that he simply accepted that even when he was frustrated with his lack of progress, he really did enjoy making his life harder than it had to be. It made no sense. It was counterproductive. It was frustrating. It was likely going to get him killed someday.

And it made him feel alive. Funny how that worked.

On the lower benches, one of the calves suddenly set down her empty bowl and walked over to him, bold as a flash of lightning and quiet as a shadow. He caught the tiny bleats of fear from the others as she hopped onto the bench next to him, reached into a pouch on her belt to retrieve a small box of white bark—quite possibly the most common non-magical healing substance he had ever seen a Gothar use—and started parting his hair to look for the injury. Even though he was seated, she had to stretch herself as long as she could on her little hooves to see the back of his head and the annoyed whine she gave as his hair pushed itself back into position each time she had moved it aside to treat the injury finally gave him enough information to tag her with a name.

Nessa. Of course it was Nessa. No-one else among the young ones would be bold enough to just walk up to him like that.

“Did she win the bet?”

Reü laughed. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “I am a nephilim. We are not strangers to bad ideas.” Although as far as he had been able to tell, bad nephilim ideas mainly revolved around picking lethal fights with your newborn siblings. And then picking fights with everyone else. Or maybe that second part was just him. “Give her my congratulations.”

Again, Reü obliged and this time the sounds that came from Nessa were dripping both annoyance and fondness. She shook her head at him before hopping off the bench and returning to her seat as if nothing had happened. He was tempted to paw at the wound, but he could tell she had accomplished what she had set out to do. It already hurt less. Or maybe he just _believed_ that it hurt less now that it was treated.

“She said you’re so stubborn, even your hair has to make trouble. It can’t decide whether it’s red, brown or black and it never stays in place.”

Immediately, one of the elders nudged a little closer towards her. The gesture was unmistakable. As kind as house Etu-Goth had been to him, they did not trust him. Most likely they never would. He took a deep sigh.

“This one,” he pointed at Nessa with his half-eaten skewer, “this one is sharp as a whip.” He wanted to say ‘she will go far’, but he knew she would not. “She definitely has a point.”

Daragh raised an eyebrow at that. “You think?”

“No. I _know_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the Maker child being saved from an insane construct is a nod to Ghorn.


	4. And So Shall Be Our Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was always just a matter of time until the nephilim would find him and the last surviving Gothar. Now that the time has come, Strife's skills are put to their first serious test.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bye bye, Etu-Goth OCs! Welcome back Nephilim!  
> This chapter's probably full of typos and I apologize for that. I just don't have the energy for proof-reading these days.

The days had grown darker and, no, that was not just his mood. He scowled at the red sun that stood lower over the horizon than it ever had before. He knew there was another sun, white as snow, but he hadn’t seen it since his earliest days with house Etu-Goth. He was tempted to say that the entire solar system had decided to underscore the Gothar’s impending doom, but that would have been overly dramatic.

That said, he would not have been surprised if his kin had delayed their annihilation of the Gothar for the dramatic effect. He had a feeling Absalom would find it amusing.

“You’re brooding again.” Reü sat down next to him with a resigned sigh and inspected his work. He wasn’t nearly as good a hunter as Shivvan, pretty abysmal actually, but Shivvan had been too sick to stand for two days now and so the responsibility of watching the nephilim as he set about his daily tasks had fallen to another elder.

 _No. Not sick. Old_. He felt a small tremor run through his body at the thought.

Angels were immortal. Demons as well. They could get sick and they could get hurt, but they could not die of old age. The Creator had made it so. As a result, Nephilim were supposedly immortal either, although the Creator had not had his hands in their... well... creation, although he could not be sure of it. After all, even the eldest of them, Absalom, was only a few years old, if his memory served him right. He supposed the fact that Shivvan’s fate would never be his should have been comforting, but instead he only found it more unsettling. With a carefully practiced pull, he tore the skin of the horned beast he had hunted for the village and set it aside next to the bench. Arissa would want that hide for her leatherwork later.

“I still don’t quite get it,” he finally murmured as he began removing the creature’s organs one by one. Some were edible. Some were not. He’d have to be careful. “He seemed just fine three days ago.”

“Some creatures age gradually,” Reü explained with a short nod. “Their dying is a slow, drawn-out process that can stretch years, decades, centuries, even entire millennia. For us, it is a more of a sudden change, though by no means unexpected. It’s been almost five-thousand years since Shivvan’s magic first exhausted him. That is roughly the usual amount of time that passes... in between our prime and our fall.” A tiny spark flew from Reü’s hand, rekindling the dying fire in front of them. The warmth was welcome, if not entirely needed. “With a bit of luck, his soul will have passed back into the tree of life before they get here.”

‘They’ being his kin, the nephilim. He scowled as he threw the creature’s spleen onto the ‘inedible’ heap. Following the incident in the swamp, Shivvan had taken him on a full patrol, to assess just how much land had remained untouched by his kin. It had not been much and it had become less each day, a thought that unsettled him more than it should have.

 _What exactly are you afraid of_ , he found himself asking no-one in particular in his mind. _Death?_ He had already almost died once. Certainly there were worse fates. _The demise of the Gothar?_ That had been inevitable since the day the nephilim had set foot on this planet. And what did it matter anyway? _They are not your kin._

“As opposed to the ones who did actually try to kill me...” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but he could tell that he had by Reü’s briefly confused expression. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. “So how come it’s always you who haunts me like a shadow while I’m in the village?”

“Aside from the fact that you are kin to those who are going to slay us?”

He cringed, then continued his task of butchering his prey. The organs were done. Now he had to separate the meat from the bone. Tedious, but at least that meant he was almost done. “I suppose that would make most of the elders rather disinclined to helping me.”

“And all of the calves.”

“Except maybe Nessa.” Surprisingly enough, she had continued being anything but frightened of him, even after she had won the bet. He didn’t mind, so long as she did not interfere with his hunts. Or his training. “I’m surprised Daragh hasn’t taken at least a few opportunities to sit here with me and berate me without end. She always seemed to enjoy that so much.”

“She didn’t.” Reü chuckled, a dark sound that made him cough through the smoke of his pipe. “Believe it or not: Daragh is a very kind soul.”

That made him laugh. Daragh, who had broken several of his bones just to teach him a point that could have been made in a short conversation. Daragh, who never missed the opportunity to throw a snide remark at him. Daragh, who had regularly threatened to kill him if he put so much as a toe out of line. “Oh yes, she’s kindness incarnate.”

“Do you think your brethren will be kind to you upon their arrival?”

He paused in the middle of the cut he had been making, the flesh of one of the beast’s thighs half-detached from the bone. “What kind of question is that?”

“An honest one.”

“A pointless one,” he lobbed back. “Daragh is not one of my brethren.”

“Thankfully,” Reü replied with a snort. “Does your flank still hurt?”

“What?” Where had that change of topics come from? _And why do I have a feeling like this is another of Daragh’s underhanded lessons?_

“Your ribs,” Reü murmured. “They were broken and mangled when I found you. They caused you great pain. Do they hurt when you hunt? Do they hurt when you bend over like you do now, stretching to cleave flesh from bone in one swift motion?”

“No...” He still wasn’t sure where this was going.

“That is good to hear. Do you think that would still be the case if you had done nothing but lie in bed, letting your joints go stiff, since you got here?”

 _Oh._ “You’re saying Daragh being so hostile towards me is her way of preparing me for my reunion with my kin.”

That did actually make a lot of sense, just like sticking him with all the tasks that required physical exertion and the handling of weapons made sense, not just as a means to lessen the burden on the Gothar elders, but also as a way to let him build up some muscle and practice his skills with a blade. He knew he had already grown much stronger since his birth. For starters, he couldn’t have survived an ambush from _this_ beast, which was just as wide and long as he was tall, with nothing but a knife on his first day. He had no illusion about his rank among his brethren—he was probably still pathetically weak compared to them—but he had improved.

The legs were finished, all six of them. He severed what bone and sinew remained from the torso and started working on the ribs. An exercise in tedium, but that too was a valuable lesson. “So why is she not here then, kindly preparing me for the antagonism of Absalom?”

“Because she is far too busy casting allay spells on the calves.”

“Allay?” It was the first he heard of such a spell, which pointed towards it not being part of a demon’s repertoire. For all her efforts to make the nephilim equal parts demon and angel, Lilith had failed miserably in imparting much angelic knowledge or decorum on them. He supposed it was intentional. After all, the last thing she needed was for her children to turn on her and make friendly with the forces of order instead.

That almost made him want to try it, just to spite her.

“’Allay’ is a derivative of the spells ‘Fortification’ and ‘Alleviate’. I believe she explained both of these two you?”

“She did.” It didn’t take his brain long to recall the entire lesson in full clarity and force a grimace onto his face. Even when teaching healing spells, Daragh had been rather violent. “‘Fortification’ makes its target less susceptible to physical damage and prevents them from feeling any pain. ‘Alleviate’ soothes pain from an injury without healing the wound itself.”

“Very good.” Reü nodded. “Can you guess why she is casting a related spell on the calves then?”

“Because she doesn’t want them to suffer.” That much was obvious. Daragh, for all her aloofness, was the leader of the Etu-Goth elders for a good reason and one of, if not the most important of her duties, was to ensure the well-being of the Gothar young. “But if that’s the case, why not just use ‘Fortification’? That one can even be bound in shards, to use whenever necessary. Just give each calf one of those. Problem solved.”

“Problem not solved,” Reü argued. “What exactly does Fortification do?”

“I already said.” He knew it was pointless to argue. Reü would sit here until he gave him the answer. The Gothar were stubborn like that. Still, he couldn’t suppress the urge to rebel against his somewhat condescending tone. Even just a little. “It makes the target less susceptible to physical damage and prevents them from feeling pain.”

“ _Less susceptible_ ,” Reü said pointedly, “but not _immune_. Would you want their deaths to be even longer and more horrifying than they are doubtlessly going to be?”

His hands froze, stuck between the cold ribs of the creature he had slain. He could see the picture in his mind, clear as day. The nephilim, swinging their axes and hammers and swords and scythes again and again, leaving mere cuts where there should be crushed bones and sundered organs, causing no pain, but more and more fear with every cut. A long, drawn-out dying at the hands of an ever-more frustrated, ever-more blood-thirsty band of half-demons.

Fortification was one of the most useful spells a warrior could have, but only in a battle that could actually be _won_. In this case, it would not be helpful. It would not be kind.

“Do the calves know?”

He shuddered at the thought that they might not. _What must it be like_ , he wondered for the first time since he had woken up in this village, _to wake up day after day and know that something was wrong and yet no-one would explain what exactly it was?_ He _knew_ the face of his impending, almost certain doom, but if they did not... Some of them were old and skilled enough to transition from the village to the cities, from calf to student. Just yesterday he had seen one of the female calves cast a fire spell strong enough to light the main hearth of the village and every torch in the room without singing a single hair on anyone. He had heard her excitement and her complaints when Daragh had first nodded, then shaken her head. She had passed the test, but she was not allowed to go. Did she know why? Did the others know why they were no longer allowed to play in the nearby forest? Why Daragh was casting healing magic on them? Why the stranger was the only one sent out to hunt? Did they know that they were all going to die a gruesome death by steel and magic soon? Did they _know_?

“They don’t.” Reü took a deep breath. “And you will _not_ tell them or so help me the Creator himself, we will break every bone in your body and flay you alive before your kin get here.”

“You honestly think this is right?” He buried his hunting knife deep enough inside the ribcage he was working on to get the hilt stuck. It would be a pain to remove now, but he found he didn’t care. “Can you imagine the terror they will feel when the nephilim horde will roll over this place, completely unexpected?”

“Yes. An intense, short-lived terror. Can you imagine the terror they would feel every—single—day if we told them now?”

“Yes, I can.” He supported the underside of the rib cage with his left hand, then hit the knife’s hilt hard enough to send it halfway through with his right. He still cut himself lightly when he pulled it through from underneath, but the injury was shallow. It would be gone by the day after tomorrow. “That is the situation all of the rest of us are in, is it not?”

“Only in the most literal of meanings.” He had hit a nerve. He could tell from the sheer contempt in Reü’s voice. Angering him was no small feat, but apparently his question had done just that. Reü’s brows furrowed in cold fury. “Death is not terrifying because of what it gives to us, but for what it takes _from_ us. Everything we ever were. Everything we ever could be. If you truly think that someone like me, who has already lived a long and fulfilled life, or you, who has little more than the bare bones of a life, a self, has just as much to lose as the little ones, than you are truly nephilim in your callous arrogance.”

He took one last smoke from his pipe, then emptied the ashes out onto the fire and got up quickly. “Arissa will keep you company for the remainder of your task. She can treat that hide while you finish your work.”

For an old man who was nearing the end of his life, Reü could still move fast as a shadow if he wanted. He had disappeared back into the village sanctuary before the fire had finished gobbling up the ashes from his pipe. Suddenly, the wind seemed just a little colder, the sky just a little darker. Or perhaps that was just his mood and the glamor affecting his senses. Doubtful, but he was almost hoping that that was the case.

The door opened almost as soon as it had closed. Arissa walked over to him, weary but undeterred and sat down on the far side of the heap of fur and skin to his right. She nodded at him wordlessly and began her work.

***

Shivvan had lasted another eight days and so had the lands around the village, though barely. It had been tricky, finding a patch of earth far enough away from the village to qualify for a burial site, but close enough to keep the calves from accidentally wandering into the ashes left behind by the nephilim. He had kept his jaw firmly clenched and his brow set in a scowl throughout the ceremony as well. He had been fairly certain that, in between the loud praying and the even louder singing, they would all die a sudden death by ambush soon, but apparently fate had decided to stay its hand.

The feast in Shivvan’s honor had been as magnificent as any celebration so shortly before annihilation could have been, but that too had not lasted long. The very next morning, life inside the village had returned to normal, as if nothing had happened. When he had questioned Daragh about it, all she had said was ‘humble are our beginnings’.

_And so shall be our ends._

It was now four days since Shivvan’s passing, and he frowned at the sight in front of him. He had barely walked a hundred paces into the swamp, but already the tangled roots and gnarled trees had made way for strips of ash and ash and ash and ash, as far as his eye could see. He hadn’t spotted a single animal yet, hadn’t heard the slightest peep of a bird. If he came back home empty-handed today, would the calves know what was wrong? Would the elders realize how serious the situation was? Would someone finally panic?

He pushed the thought away and started patrolling the edge of the wasteland in front of him instead. Spotting prey would do him no good if it ran off into a sea of dust. Herding it towards the village was less than ideal, but his choices were few.

Forty-nine paces later, he spotted her.

At first, he had believed himself to be in luck, had believed the thin speck in the distance to be an animal that had strayed out into the ashen fields. He had aimed Mercy, ready to pull the trigger, only to find his fingers frozen.

He knew her. He had seen her before, vague and distant, and the memory also brought back recollections of fire gnawing at his feet and his ribs feeling like a pit of spikes in his torso. It brought back the memory of Absalom’s callous laugh, Lilith’s self-satisfied smirk, the cheers of a crowd looking for blood, and the bait-and-switch kindness of the one with the scythes. Most importantly though, it brought back the memory of being weak, tired, exhausted, and utterly drained.

Back then, he had called her a skeleton and now, in the light of day—what little the red sun offered—he could see that his eyes had not deceived him. She was taller than he was, but thin as the twigs to his feet. He wasn’t sure whether those were clothes draped over her bones or just her skin, but they moved softly in the eerie breeze that grazed the plains all the same. Her hair was the sickly white of flax and it hung from her head in thin strands, like cobwebs clinging to her shoulders. Her gait was staggering yet relentless at the same time, too quick to be a shuffle, too slow to be a walk. She swayed in the wind, looking as if she were to keel right over.

Until she looked straight at him.

A sudden spike of panic pierced him, but he pushed it back down. _Focus. You have to focus. You know you can do this. You KNOW._ He took a deep breath and counted silently to ten, then refocused his aim. He hadn’t even realized he had lost it. Not good.

The skinny lady was smiling and it was by far the most unsettling thing he had seen in... well, forever, really. There were too many teeth in that mouth, not a single hint of a tongue, and just enough strips of flesh to suggest that she was not just made of bones after all, that ‘skeleton’ was not her natural state, just the result of weeks of starvation. And from the way the edges of the overly short flaps that might have been lips curved, she saw him as dinner.

Around him, the leaves of the trees and the roots of the thicket slowly turned brown and started to crumble, as if the very life had been drained from them. Then, the screams started.

They came from the village and most of them were high-pitched enough to make his ears tickle in discomfort. Worse, all of them were familiar. He gave one last look at the walking skeleton—still too far out for him to care—and turned around to head back into the village. Somewhere not far away, a bird cried out in alarm.

He made it a total of eleven paces before something kicked his feet right out from underneath him. He cursed as he rolled to avoid the patches of swamp that were treacherous pools and steadied himself, as Shivvan had taught him. Mercy was a familiar and comforting weight in his hand, as he took in his surroundings. The vines and roots were rustling all around him, yet there was no-one there. At least, no-one he could see and that was a first. It ticked him off more than he would have thought. After all the ways in which he had already been cursed with weakness, did one of his two blessings—his impeccable senses—really have to fail him now, of all times?

The second hit struck him in the shoulder and when he quickly reached for the offending spot, he could have sworn he had felt his fingers brush against something. However, whoever his attacker was, they had not wasted any time. The... thing... on his back had twisted and pushed off a nearby trunk, sending him staggering into one of the pools. Somehow the water felt even colder and deader than usual and he coughed and sputtered as he dragged himself back onto relatively dry land.

That’s when he realized that his sight was not the only thing failing him.

He coughed, but there was no sound. He had cursed, but there had been no sound. He could see the foliage move, but he could not hear a thing, had not, since that shrill cry from the bird.

Or had it been a bird? He planted his back against the closest tree and took a deep breath. Shivvan had taught him the sounds and movements of every creature that roamed these lands. He had taught him their names and their habitats and their uses. And there was no bird in these swamps that made a noise so clear and yet so vibrating. On second thought, it hadn’t sounded like any bird he had ever seen.

It had sounded like someone imitating a bird.

His gaze went up and so did his gun, almost automatically. Amidst the slowly fading leaves and vines and the mist rising from the murky waters, her black skin shone out almost as brightly as the white sun would have. It stood out so clearly to him he wanted to kick himself for not having spotted her sooner.

Instead, he aimed and pulled the trigger in one swift motion.

The sound that pierced the silence mimicked the one he had heard before, except that it did not stop. Crying quickly turned into howling as she fell from the tree and into the swamp, clutching her shoulder in pain. Now that the waters of the swamp were starting to swallow her, he could see that she wore only the thinnest of garments, a dress made of flowing fabric, rather than armor. Granted, for someone hiding in the trees steel might not have been the best option, but certainly even good leather armor would have done a better job protecting her. _Then again_ , he thought to himself as he looked down at his own hunter’s garb, _who am I to talk about inadequate armor?_

The vines around him moved again and now he could see the splashes in the water, quick and frantic things that rushed towards the fallen nephilim. A pair of ethereal hands reached deep into the swamp, grasping frantically for the one who had been swallowed. Through the light reflected in the water that clung to her skin, he could finally make out the vague silhouette of a little girl.

“You’re never going to get her out like that.”

The near-invisible girl hissed at him in contempt. He shook his head, holstered Mercy, and walked over to her in brisk strides. There was a good chance that he was going to regret this, but then again, she _was_ his sister. They both were. Just because _they_ had lowered themselves to Absalom’s standards of trying to murder their brother did not mean _he_ ’d have to do the same. He was better than that.

Finding the roots that kept her down was easy. After all, there was not much left. He took out his knife and made quick work of the offending plants, then plunged his hand in deep and pulled her out by her throat.

The wound was not bleeding too much, but he could tell he had hit the shoulder joint and the bullet was still there. She was not going to die. However, that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to be in pain. The growl she gave him as her sister pushed the wet and tangled hair off of her face only confirmed it.

“Put pressure on that wound.” They hissed at him in unison. He couldn’t have cared less. “Stay. The skeleton should be here soon.”

He would really have to learn their names. Eventually. For now, he had bigger concerns.

The sounds of the swamp had returned. The screams from the village mostly had not. Mostly.

He stopped just before the thicket would become light enough for any attackers in the village to see him and breathed in deeply. He could do this. Daragh had taught him how to do this. This was his gift, one of only two he had received, and it would make him succeed, just as his senses had made him succeed right now. He would not fail again. The glamor came first. Then, he reminded himself of the worst nightmares he had had of this day, before stepping out of the swamp and crossing the field into the village proper.

Somehow, this was still worse than his worst nightmares.

The bodies were everywhere. Big, small, male, female. Part of him was glad he had not bothered to learn everybody’s names, but that only made it marginally better. Just this morning he had broken his fast with these Gothar. Now, they were little more than mangled corpses. The lucky ones had gone quickly, felled by a swift beheading or a spear through the heart or lungs. The less lucky ones had been torn apart. One particularly unlucky one had been burned to a crisp—while still alive, judging from the way he had apparently been trying to shield two calves from a hail of arrows—and if it hadn’t been for the pipe hanging from his belt, he would never in a million years have been able to tell that this had been Reü. Kind, patient, Reü, whose first concern had always been the young ones. He had deserved better. They all had.

On the far side of the village plaza, beyond the hut where he had rested for many nights, Absalom laughed as he ripped his axe from another Gothar corpse. Behind him, most of the remaining nephilim swarmed like locusts. He could see the bloodlust in their eyes, as well as the frustration on their faces, and the distinct lack of blood on their weapons. One particularly brash one seemed to be five seconds away from reaching for her whip and going for Absalom herself.

_What are you all waiting for?_

And then he remembered. The silent girl. The ethereal girl. The skeletal lady. He had seen them all before, the day he had been born and nearly killed. They had been first in line then and they were first in line now. The firstborn.

“Silence? Done exploring already?”

He turned around slowly—How did this girl usually move? Slow? Fast? Deliberate? Skittish? He had only seen her tumble out of a tree and that was hardly something that would have been practical or wise to replicate. He settled for a slow half-turn instead, just enough to look at the owner of that cocky voice.

It took him all his willpower to keep up the illusion, to pretend to be a sound-negating nephilim girl in a flimsy dress, rather than... well... himself.

There was blood all over the sanctuary and the bodies were piled high inside the door. The banner on the left had been drenched a deep red that bordered on purple in Gothar blood. In front of it stood a massive scythe, planted firmly in the ground. The sharp edge was mostly hidden by the body impaled on it. Blood dripped from the old, gnarled face, soaking through thin braids of white laced with purple strings, and falling quietly onto the broken staff beneath the lifelessly dangling feet. At least, he could only assume that it was actually quietly. To him, every drop was like thunder. One of her milky eyes had been ripped from its socket. The other was staring wearily at the nephilim in front of her.

It was the other thin one among the firstborn, the one whose flesh looked deathly pale and almost rotting. The one who had pulled him from the pyre, who had given him his cowl and let him get away. Then again, he was also the one who had chosen to defile the spirit of an old crone who had almost certainly died to defend her kin from him with necromancy. That left very little room for gratitude. The necromancer’s face was set in a stern scowl as the words crawled out of his throat with all the smoothness of gravel.

“You know whom I am speaking of, old hag. Where is he?”

Daragh... or rather the re-animated corpse that had once been Daragh... laughed softly as a whisper and he could have sworn that eye of hers had flickered to him, just for a fraction of a second.

“Hey, Death, I think Silence is developing a new and morbid curiosity in your skills.” That was the other nephilim talking. The one with the shining armor, the bow and arrow, the obnoxiously drawling voice, and the smug grin that he just wanted to shoot off of his face.

“I am busy, Conquest,” Death replied tersely. No love lost there. “I know the idea of responsibility is inherently repulsive to you, but how about you deal with her for once?”

That elicited a sneer and a light growl from the bowman. A futile gesture, as Death had already returned to his interrogation. “Fine. Alright, Silence, come here.” A second passed. Then another. “I said come here, you haughty little brat!”

 _Oh. Right. ‘Silence’ is me right now._ He wanted to slap himself for the obvious and potentially fatal lapse in maintaining his carefully crafted illusion. He could only hope—no—he _knew_ it had not shown to his brothers, but that wasn’t going to be worth much, if he didn’t act soon. He forced a defiant pout onto his face and stepped a little closer.

“Perfect. Now, watch and learn.” Conquest took a pale blue arrow from his quiver and drew his bow. “First up: ice.”

The projectile made nary a sound as it left Conquest’s hand, shot forward, and embedded itself in its target. The target on the other hand...

The scream was loud and high-pitched enough to make his ears ring and his heart sink. He hadn’t recognized her at first, partially because all the calves still looked much the same to him and partially because she was covered in blood from the dozens of arrows that had nailed her to the banner streaming on the right side of the door, but he knew her voice.

_Nessa. Brave, cheerful Nessa..._

There was no bravery in the sound that left her mouth, no cheer in the way her face twisted in pain. Clearly the ‘Allay’ spell had died with Daragh and what Death had brought back for a chat was apparently not enough to restore its effect. From the spot where the arrow had pierced Nessa’s elbow, pale frost spread quickly up and down her arm.

Conquest drew another arrow, this one seemingly made of some kind of shining metal, and sent it right next to the first. It burst the ice into a dozen pieces, leaving Nessa with a stump for her right arm and her detached hand nailed to the wall by a previous projectile.

“Let’s see... what next...” Conquest reached into his quiver blindly and drew another arrow. His face lit up in unbridled blood lust as he saw what he had picked. “Ooh, I love these! Electricity!”

This time, he took even less time to aim, yet the arrow landed flawlessly in Nessa’s right knee. Sparks crackled up her body as she convulsed in agony. Screams soon tapered off into sobs and bleats as her strength left her slowly.

“Alright, this one’s not going to last for much longer now, so how about this?” This time, Conquest did check to make sure which arrow he chose and the sight sent an involuntary shiver down his spine. He had seen that pitch-black monstrosity before. “Necromancy arrow, courtesy of Death. You use that as the finishing blow and it brings the target right back. Use it for a non-lethal shot, and it will work its magic once the target dies. Probably won’t make this one talk again, but it will be enough to make it twitch and scream. And after that, I’ll let you fire two or three at it for practice, alright?”

 _Alright? ALRI—_ He swallowed hard to suppress the urge to punch his brother in the face. Nothing was alright here. Not calling Nessa ‘it’, not using necromancy on a Gothar, not involving him in this. Killing an opponent was one thing. Turning it into some kind of sick game like this was another.

Instead of punching Conquest as he dearly wanted, he nodded, shifted his stance to prepare for the mess he was doubtlessly just about to get himself into, and drew Mercy.

He fired his bullet only a moment before Conquest loosened his arrow, but it was, thankfully, enough. The bullets hit first, tearing through Nessa’s brain in one swift motion. The arrow landed in her throat just a blink too late, preventing its necromancy from taking hold.

Then again, that was the least of his problems now.

In front of him and to his right, Conquest lowered his bow and sneered at him in sheer anger. “Silence, what are you doing?”

“More importantly...” Absalom’s voice was halfway between amused and suspicious. The rest of the nephilim trailed in his wake as he approached the scene with slow, but deliberate steps. “Where did you get that gun?”

“ _Most_ importantly,” Death sneered at them all from the entrance to the hut and somehow that scythe had already made its way back into his hand. He looked just about ready to murder someone. _Three guesses whom..._ “Who are you and what have you done with our sister?”

On the bright side, Daragh was now at peace again. So was Nessa. He could only hope their souls would manage to escape from this world before anybody else in his charming family got any ideas of resurrecting outmatched foes. To his far right, the three sisters emerged from the swamp, one stumbling, one holding the other up, and the third watching over them both. She would have looked almost kind had she not been little more than skin draped over bones.

“Well... I guess of all the things that could have given me away, this isn’t one I should regret.”

At last, he decided to let the illusion fall away. His stature changed first, then his clothes, then his face. Lastly, his skin, hair, and eyes returned to their usual color. Most of the nephilim seemed merely confused by the change and he supposed that made sense. After all, to them he had been nothing more than ‘one of the ten potential siblings who got couldn’t even survive for five minutes’. Only two of them seemed to recognize him.

Death lowered his scythe and looked him over carefully, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own eyes.

Absalom frowned in frustration. Then, a dark grin curved his lips. “Come to die again, boy?”

“I hate to break this to you, but you couldn’t even kill me the first time.”

He knew he was playing with fire. Worse than fire, actually, but somehow he couldn’t find it in his heart to be worried. Maybe it was the reassuring weight of Mercy in his hand. Maybe it was the fact that he had already done the first thing he had set out to do—control his glamor. Now, it was time to go for his second goal.

He could do this. He _would_ do this.

“Come over here, you coward, and try again.”


	5. Strife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Faced with Absalom in battle once more, the time has come for Strife to show who he really is and what he can do. Even if it costs his life.

„Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

The chant rang in his ears, an auditory assault from all sides as a circle formed around them. The same ten nephilim who had formed the front row before were doing so again, weapons bared and shoulders squared, determined to prevent any attempt at escape. Behind them, hundreds more bolstered the defense, but while some of the more impatient ones pushed and shoved to get a better view, none dared to interrupt the first circle. Absalom, whose right hand was once again wielding that twisted, three-eyed battle ax as if it had the weight of a tooth pick, stood towering and grinning.

In its very basics, the situation was painfully familiar. Literally.

The pain that shot through his flank was not real and he knew it. It was an echo of their first fight, unbidden and inconvenient and he took a deep breath as he tried to put it out of his mind. _Not now. Not yet._ There was a time for glamor and tricks and it was not now.

“Remind me of the rules again. I was kind of busy not dying the last time we did this.”

Absalom’s grin only widened. “I win and you die. _Those_ are the rules.”

“Unless you manage to injure Absalom or manage to hold out undefeated until Lilith’s pendulum stops swinging,” the one with the scythe lobbed back with a frown. How someone with a face that kind could perpetually look like he was willing to murder everyone was anybody’s guess.

“Well, Lilith is not here, though, is she?”

“I’ll keep the time, I’ll make it mine...” It was one of the five female nephilim in the first circle who offered her ‘assistance’, although he wasn’t sure that was the right word. She lapsed back into frantic, mumbled rambling as soon as the words were spoken, all the while twisting strings around the awkwardly ridged glaive she was holding. It wasn’t until he focused on the texture of the weapon that he realized it was made of several dozens of pale spines, straightened painfully and fused together into one long stick. He would have bet his right hand that the strings had been someone’s hair at some point. And somehow, even now all of it still looked somewhat... alive. “Stop to stop makes end to end. Lace and layer, weave and bend.”

“You are completely mad.”

That only turned Absalom’s grin into laughter and the other nephilim soon followed. The skeletal lady to his left sounded strangely proud, even though her voice was thin as a blade of grass. “What do you think we call our sister dearest? _Madness_.”

 _You are all mad_ , he wanted to say, but he managed to swallow the words just in time before they left his mouth. Who was he to talk? He could have left this world soon as he had been able to walk again, but no, he had waited here for Absalom to arrive, to challenge him to another battle to the death.

 _“All nephilim are blood mad”,_ Daragh had once told him. _“The well that spawned your souls was poisoned from the moment that demon harlot conceived you.”_

“Alright then,” Absalom rolled his shoulders—including the left that had started growing back the first few inches of arm he had been missing during their first duel. “Madness will let us know when she’s done decorating Frenzy. In the highly unlikely event that you are not dead by then, you may join our army.”

It was extremely unlikely, but he nodded all the same. There was no way he was going to outlast Absalom for however long this insane hag would take to finish her crafts project. As a matter of fact, he fully suspected her to unravel the damn thing once she was nearly done and start all over. Given the reputation the nephilim had throughout the galaxy, that was the most likely outcome. No, he’d have to get Absalom first. He tightened his grip around Mercy.

“I’m ready.”

He was not.

The first swing of the ax missed him so closely, he could feel the rush of the air as he ducked and see the hairs it had cut off his head as they floated down in front of his face. As Nessa had always said, they couldn’t seem to decide whether they wanted to be red or brown or black and the thought only brought back renewed awareness of _where_ he was fighting. He looked at the spot where something had crunched beneath his boot to find the burned corpse of a Gothar there. The embers of the village’s central fireplace sparked softly as Absalom crushed them under his heel.

This time they were not fighting on some mountain plateau. They were fighting in a sea of corpses. This was the unfamiliar part.

He rolled out of the way of the second swing and narrowly dodged the third. Absalom, for all his size and bulk was terrifyingly fast and though part of him wanted to just aim the damn gun and get it over with, he was quite confident that his own arm would _not_ grow back like Absalom’s, should that ax hit home. He had to wait for an opening. If he could hold out just that long, drown out just enough of that—

“You are still a coward, boy!” Gone was the grin. Suddenly, a shadow had cast over Absalom’s face, turning those flat features into something downright demonic. “You were a coward when you first fought me!” The next swing came low and whatever momentum and balance he had had before evaporated as he jumped to avoid getting his shins separated from his knees. “And you are still a coward now!”

The ax returned with the same speed, only this time it came in high. He was just about ready to dodge when the weapon suddenly slipped from Absalom’s hand, planting itself into the ground with an abrupt thud, as if gravity itself had claimed it and was unwilling to give it back to anyone but its master.

The ax had stopped. Absalom’s fist had not.

His jaw cracked under the impact and the pain was instantaneous. Blood spilled from where those knuckles, tough as stone, had split open the skin and flesh of his cheek. The sheer force of the blow sent him tumbling off to the right until one of the others caught him and pushed him back into the ring. He landed on all fours, spit out three of his teeth, and set his mind to convincing himself that it was not as bad as it felt. It probably wasn’t. At least he hoped so.

“I—ammod...”

Alright. Maybe it was as bad as it felt. At the very least, it was bad enough to render the muscles of his jaw incapable of forming the words ‘I am not’, while also making agony the likes of which he had never known sear through his entire head at the mangled effort to form those three simple words.

Absalom picked up his ax—once again seemingly light as a feather—and lifted it for one final strike.

“For a moment I actually fought you had guts, but now I see your challenge for what it truly is: a pathetic attempt to save your face.”

He wanted to ask if the pun was intended, but his jaw refused. Numbing it out right now was the best he could do for now.

Absalom’s voice grew cold as ice. “I’ll make sure there’ll be nothing left of it before we turn this world and you to ash.”

The ax came down in a straight, swift cut. Easy to dodge. This was a trap. He _knew_ it was a trap, yet what was he supposed to do? His options were few. He could stay put and get cleaved in two or he could dodge to either side and reap whatever damage Absalom was sowing.

He decided on rolling left at the last second. That way, the worst Absalom could do was backhand him, which would hopefully not be as painful as a straight up punch. This time, he did not even think about aiming— _you only need to injure him, not kill him, it won’t matter where you hit_. Instead, he merely raised his arm and pulled the trigger.

Absalom turned in kind and used the momentum to kick his wrist hard enough to shatter a few more bones. Mercy slipped from his grip and was swiftly kicked to the crowd where Conquest claimed it for himself. Behind where Absalom had stood, the one with the scythe waited silently, four bullet holes seared into his chest. If he was in any pain, he did not show it.

 _How? Just how?_ He had hunted with this gun. He knew how fast it was. How powerful. How in all the realms between Heaven and Hell had Absalom managed to somehow be faster than that?

The shock must have shown on his face, because Absalom grinned as he gripped him by the throat and raised him high enough to make his feet dangle uselessly above the ground. Above Absalom’s fingers, his jaw screamed bloody murder.

“You will pay for your recklessness, boy.”

And pay he did. The first slam knocked the breath out of his lungs. The second knocked out blood. The third shattered both one of his shoulders and one of the benches around the fire. The fourth ended with his face in the embers, just long enough to make him feel as if his face was melting, but not long enough to scar. He had been half a second away from screaming out whatever was left of his lungs when Absalom raised him up one more time and threw him onto the closest pile of Gothar corpses. Even through the blood and ash that coated his eyes, he could tell that those charred hands were too small to belong to an elder.

“And now, to end this.”

Absalom picked up his ax once more, its green eyes twitching in almost malicious anticipation and all of a sudden the truth hit him with such clarity, all he could do was acknowledge his own stupidity in the face of this fight.

It was the damn ax. It had been the damn ax all along.

The bow had arrows imbued with different kinds of magic. The scythe could apparently change size at will. The glaive seemed to almost be... alive... still. It was hardly a stretch to imagine that the damned ax was not just a weapon either. Now that he knew, he could feel the pull of its gaze, the way it felt like the same gnarled, black tendrils that fused the blade to the shaft wrapped around his limbs every time he tried to move, every time the eyes focused on him. And there were three of them. At least _one_ eye was _always_ focused on him.

_Think, damn you, think!_

With every step Absalom took, he could feel his heart beat faster. He was about five seconds from death and he needed a strategy, preferably yesterday. It couldn’t be so hard now, could it? He hadn’t let physical shortcomings get in his way when he had hunted for the Gothar, when he had slain a raptor of the plains, when he had injured the other nephilim girl. Everyone had a weakness that could be exploited. Even Daragh, for all her wisdom and power, had not been perfect, if you knew what to look for. Absalom could bleed and he could lose limbs. He was not invulnerable.

Then again, he had given that arm up willingly to— _oh._ _Yes. That was right. To HER._

Everyone had a weakness. Even Absalom.

Absalom, who was now standing in front of him, looking down on him as if he were nothing but an insect to be squashed, ax firmly in hand and ready to cleave him in two for real this time.

“You should have known better than to pick another fight with me, boy.”

Absalom’s arm moved backwards, gathering momentum for one last swing. He thought back to his lessons with Daragh, his hunts with Shivvan, his time with the others, and he almost wanted to laugh at the revelation that hit him like a sack full of rocks. It didn’t matter if his jaw was in pieces. It didn’t matter if his lungs were injured. It didn’t matter if he had the breath or the tongue to speak the words. All that mattered was that Absalom needed to believe he had heard them.

“Time to die, cow—”

“All this fun and you do not even invite me?”

The ax paused. Absalom paused. For a moment, the crowd around them fell quiet. Six-hundred heads turned in one direction, looking far behind Absalom, to find the source of that alluring voice, but they would come up empty. He knew it just as surely as he knew that his lips had moved, even though they had looked closed to everyone else. For just a moment, he had them all fooled, and a moment was all he needed.

He reached for the knife fastened to his belt and used what little strength was left in his body to propel himself forward. The blade hit home hard, entering straight between two of Absalom’s ribs.

Of course, the pain that shot through him as his entire body revolted against the suicidal exertion destroyed the illusion. The annoying little sting Absalom probably felt did all the rest. The look in his eyes as he shook off the haunting echo of Lilith’s voice was one of pure murder. Once again, that iron hand fastened around his throat.

“You little runt! You cowardly—”

“My name...” He could feel the blood as it bubbled up in his throat. It didn’t matter. “...is...” He was not going to give him this. Not now. Not after everything. If a Gothar calf could touch a nephilim without fear, then so he could be brave in the face of certain death. He was not going to give Absalom this victory. “...Strife.”

 _Conquest. Silence. Madness._ It wasn’t difficult to see the pattern. _“And if you don’t have a name by then, he will kill you. Slowly.”_ It wasn’t difficult to understand what was expected of him. Perhaps his stubborn refusal to give up had led him to certain doom. Perhaps his decision to antagonize three older and stronger nephilim than him in a single day was about to bring him a cruel and painful death.

_But at least I will die as me. I have a name. I am. Strife._

No one could take that away from him. Not Absalom. Not Lilith. Not anyone. It was as the elders had said. Damn, even Nessa, young and ignorant of everything nephilim as all the other calves had been able to see it. He lived for a challenge, for confrontation. It had allowed him to learn. It had allowed him to grow. It was in his very nature.

And if sorrow sometimes followed strife, then so be it.

_Humble were my beginnings..._

“That’s enough, Absalom!”

Suddenly, the grip around his throat vanished and he felt the impact in every bone as he hit the ground, yet somehow the earth beneath him felt surprisingly soft. Cold, but soft. It was almost like he was floating. He was tired. So very tired...

“—played us—fools—cheated!”

 _Shut up._ He didn’t care who it was that was shouting. It sounded vaguely like Absalom, but he couldn’t care. Even through the thick veil around his ears it was still too loud. He was so tired.

“—yed—the rules—won—our brother!”

 _You shut up too._ Another voice, though it was getting hard to tell them apart. Everything felt so fuzzy. So tired.

“—nameless worm—”

_Shut up._

“—is Strife.”

_Shut... up..._

“—let—die—Death.”

_Shut...._

“—make me—”

***

He was surrounded by lunatics. It was the only reasonable explanation Death could come up with for what had transpired here today, although that did not mean it was a satisfying one.

All that stalling, all that subtle corralling Absalom into taking his sweet time turning this planet to ash, and what had their youngest brother— _Strife, he has a name now_ , Death reminded himself—done with this gift? Shot Silence, antagonized Conquest and then taken special care to insult Absalom as well.

How Death had managed to talk Absalom out of cutting off Strife’s head after losing the duel, he frankly had no idea. All he knew was that neither Absalom nor Conquest were ever going to give him an inch of mercy in the future. Nephilim did not forget and they certainly did not forgive.

It was the sudden movement from the entrance of his tent that redirected Death’s attention away from his brother’s injuries. He readied himself for a lecture from Absalom or some snide remark from Conquest, only to come face to face with the person he had least expected to care about what happened to their injured brother.

“Silence? What in the Creator’s name are you doing here?”

His sister, true to her own epithet, remained mum. The gunshot would had long been treated, but she still winced as she shrugged, then slinked around to the other side of their injured brother and nodded slightly.

“He’ll be fine. Should be waking up soon, although I have half a mind to beat him senseless again as soon as he does.”

That made her giggle and her voice sounded at once young as a child and ancient as a forgotten goddess. He supposed it was appropriate. She had been born the same day as he had, yet she looked like a girl only halfway to adulthood. Always had. Probably always would. She sat down with her bare feet pressed sole to sole and started rocking and humming gently. If he had not been nearly finished with his work, Death would have told her to get lost. As things stood, having her here might actually have been a good thing. At least that way if Strife were to think of another ingenious idea to get himself nearly killed, she would manage to keep it just between the three of them.

Well, four of them. Death glanced around the tent and frowned. He could not _see_ Shade, but he had no doubt that she was present too. The twins were inseparable after all.

It only took a few more minutes for Strife to regain his senses and the groan that escaped him when he did was enough to tell Death that he had managed to heal the injuries while preserving the pain. _Serves him right._ Pain could be a useful lesson.

“What—? Where—?”

“You’re still alive,” Death replied tersely. “You’re in my tent. And you’re an idiot.”

“Ah.” If he was insulted, he did not show it. “There’s that hospitality Daragh prepared me for.”

Death frowned. That was a name he had hoped never to hear again. He remembered the old crone. She had put up rather a good fight for someone so close to the end of her life. She had even managed to seriously injure some of his younger siblings. Killing her had required a lot of dodging precisely aimed magic and some creative use of Harvester’s different forms. Then, when he had resurrected her to ask if there had been a nephilim in the village _before_ the horde arrived, she had had the gall to insult him and try to lecture him on the blasphemy that was necromancy. Stubborn as an angel, annoying as a demon and unfortunately his best chance of getting the information he needed. That was never a good combination.

“Was that...” Strife sat up slowly. “Was that you who talked Absalom out of killing me after I stabbed him?”

“You managed to wound him.” Death shrugged as he put away the rest of his supplies and whisked them away into the same pocket dimension that held most of the nephilims’ weaponry and gear. Now, only the weapons and armor spread out between him and the entrance of the tent were left. “You chose a name for yourself, too. By all the rules of the initiation, you won, and it was Absalom who created those rules in the first place.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”

“It is.” Silence actually had the audacity to stick her tongue out to him. “Congratulations, brother.”

“You seem pretty cheerful about my victory, for someone I shot.” The apprehension was clear in Strife’s voice and in the way he bristled, but to his credit, he remained seated where he was. Death shook his head. It was always the newcomers, the young ones, who treated her so indifferently. Once they saw what she was capable of on a true battlefield, though...

“Well, thanks, I guess.” It took Death a moment to realize that the gratitude had been directed not just at Silence, but also at him. By the time he had focused on the conversation again, Strife was already turning back to Silence. “I hope your shoulder’s better.” Then, his focus suddenly shifted slightly to the left. “But maybe next time you two could _not_ attack me?”

“You two?”

“Me and Shade.” Silence grinned. “We were just playing.”

“Playing. Riiiiight.”

“Hold on.” Death decided to stop him right there. “You can _see_ Shade?”

“You can’t?” Strife cocked his head and Death could have sworn there was just a tinge of ridicule in his voice, a hint of a smile on his lips. He truly was an insufferable creature. “She’s right there.” He pointed to the empty space to Silence’s right. “Right next to her. You can tell by the way the air shifts, just a little, flickering like the air above a fire.”

“Very few people have ever been able to see my sister,” Silence explained with a sly glance to her side. “I think Death’s annoyed he’s not one of those who can.”

“I’m not,” Death threw in quickly. “And it doesn’t matter now, either. We will be moving on soon. There’s no time for chatting.”

“You’re definitely annoyed,” Strife insisted. “And you’re a terrible liar.”

His hand moved almost automatically, in a swing so swift it caught Strife completely by surprise. Judging from the pained sound he gave as the backhand hit his recently healed jaw—Absalom had made quite a spectacular mess of it—it hurt just as much as Death had intended it to.

“You are a brash, insolent, unruly whelp and you should really learn to keep your mouth shut. For your own sake. Don’t think I’ll save you next time you incur Absalom’s ire.”

“No worries there. I didn’t even expect you to do it this time.”

Death blinked, took a deep breath, and forced the wrath that filled him down again one miniscule piece at a time. It was not until he was _absolutely_ sure that he was not going to strangle his brother after all that he finally spoke.

“Exactly what is your problem, Strife? You do understand that Absalom is strong enough to kill you in one strike? You do understand that Conquest and I, that most of the Firstborn, really, could kill you in any fight, any day? You do understand that you have survived through sheer luck until now, right?”

“Luck?!” Strife all but spit the word at him. “LUCK?! What makes you think that _luck_ had any damned thing to do with this? I survived my first battle with Absalom, because of _my_ gifts! I survived my injuries, because of _Daragh and Reü and the other Gothar elders_! I gained strength and skill, because _I_ worked for them! And I survived my second battle with Absalom, because _I_ was smart and _you_ were pedantic! I’m not going to pretend that this was all my doing, but luck, chance, had nothing to do with any of this.”

“If you are so sure of that, why even wait for us to get here,” Death scoffed at him. “The Tree of Life is right over there!” He pointed due northeast. “Please do not tell me that you are stupid enough to not even have considered leaving.”

“Of course I considered it.” This time, there was no bite to the words, and somehow that only made it worse. Death felt his spine tingle. He had heard that hopeless tone of voice before, many times. By the Abyss, half the time he was the cause of it! But he had never heard it from one of their own. Never from a nephilim. “After that... reception I got on my very first day in this universe, I would have loved to leave all of you behind and never deal with any of you again.”

 _Did any of the others ever feel that way_ ; Death found himself wondering, even though he tried to banish the thought as quickly as it had come. Strife wasn’t the first to have nearly died during his initiation. He was the first—and hopefully last—to have had to go through it twice, but he was not the first to have nearly been slain by Absalom. Did the others still resent Absalom and the Firstborn as much as Strife obviously did? Death could not see how. They had fought many battles together by now and not once had any of the others voiced such thoughts.

_Or maybe it is just his time with the inhabitants of this world that has made him soft._

Now _that_ was a terrifying thought. Nephilim did not deal in softness. They did not deal in kindness, in compassion. He was not sure if anyone who did would ever last long among them.

“I considered it,” Strife repeated, this time slightly less bitter, but no less... disappointed. “But in case you haven’t noticed, we nephilim have earned quite the reputation throughout the universe and it is not a good one. The angels consider us abominations, the demons think we’re Lilith’s pets, and most of the rest of the universe would sooner spit on us than even talk to us. So tell me, Death, where was I supposed to go?” He touched the markings on his shoulders, runes that looked like scars carved into his flesh. All nephilim had them, some only on one shoulder, some on both, but either way they marked them unmistakably as half-angel, half-demon. “I am a nephilim. For better or for worse, Absalom, Silence, Shade, Conquest, you... you are my family, my people. For better or for worse, this is where I belong.”

“Then you’d best learn not to antagonize Absalom every chance you get. Save the fighting for our enemies. We have enough of them.”

Strife laughed. “If that’s what you’re hoping for, you are going to be very disappointed. I’ll antagonize whomsoever I want, thank you very much.”

“I _know_.” Death could only hope that the tone of his voice conveyed just how much of a terrible idea he considered that to be. It never ceased to amaze him how some of his younger siblings were so eager to get themselves into trouble. He gestured to the assortment of armor and weapons between himself and the tent’s entrance. “Now take your pick and gear up. We should be leaving soon.”

Strife caught himself halfway through the word ‘why’, then focused on the armors instead. Death wanted to sigh in relief. Perhaps he was not a completely lost cause.

“I can choose any of these?”

“Any you want. We always carry some spare, just in case something gets damaged beyond compare in battle. All of these should be light enough for you, given how you fight.”

“Are you insulting me? Again?”

“Not yet, but if that’s what it’s going to take to get you out of here, I can do that, too.”

Strife rolled his eyes at him, then went back to inspecting the equipment. In the end, his hands reached for a familiar set of thin, soft leather covered in plates of adamantine that seemed to melt into the fabric. Death froze.

“I would not pick that if I were you.”

“You said I can take any I want.”

“You _can_. Whether you _should_ want to pick _Conquest’s_ old armor of all things is an entirely different question.”

“He will be so jealous,” Silence giggled. Death shot her a glare that could have melted steel. Riling up Conquest was never a good idea. The last thing he needed was for anybody else to give Strife bad ideas.

“He gets really angry when he feels insulted,” Shade whispered from... wherever in the tent she was currently hiding. If Strife’s eyes were to be believed, she was inspecting the weapons. “He will hate you.”

“Good!” Strife grinned as he stripped off his damaged hunting gear and slipped into the armor instead. It fused to his body to the point where it looked as if the plates were growing directly from his skin. “Because I already hate him.”

“Because of the girl?”

“Nessa,” Strife corrected Silence quickly. “Bravest child I’ve ever met. She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“If that’s how you approach battle, you will hate being a nephilim,” Death scoffed.

Strife chose to ignore him. Instead he turned to the weapons, passing up each and every single offering only to reach for the gun and knife he had carried with him into his fight with Absalom. The gun, Death could understand. It was a fine pistol, crafted expertly by the hands of the Makers, to the point where Death was not sure any of the nephilim would ever be able to fix it if it were to break. Not that that was very likely. Maker weapons could last for hundreds of thousands of years. As a matter of fact, much of what the younger nephilim carried had been forged by the Mad Smith.

But the knife? It had clearly been made by the people of this planet—Death had already forgotten their name, if he had ever known it—and seemed designed for hunting rather than conquering. He was tempted to critique the choice, but he knew it would be pointless. If he had learned anything about his youngest brother, it was that he was too stubborn for his own good, especially where the people of this planet were concerned. It was one more reason to get out of here as quickly as possible.

“You said it yourself, Strife: you _are_ a nephilim.” Fine then. If he had to pick his battles, this was one that worth resuming. “This is what we nephilim do: we conquer a planet. We kill every living creature on it. And if Absalom decides it’s not good enough, we turn it to ash and move on. If you are coming with us, you will have to get used to fighting _and_ killing.”

“Oh, I’m ready to fight and kill,” Strife lobbed back at him as he fastened a holster to his belt and stowed the gun and knife. “When there’s something worth killing. I’ll gladly leave the slaughtering of unarmed children to Conquest and his ilk.” He picked up the blood-soaked clothes he had just discarded once more and lifted them carefully. “Huh. Funny. I never realized how heavy these were.”

“There’s a Burden spell attached to the red strands woven intro the fabric,” Death mused as he returned the rest of the gear to their proper dimension. Now he just needed to return the tent back to the ash his ghouls had built it from and they would be ready to depart at last. “I noticed it when I treated your injuries. I suppose whatever fool made you wear that thought it would keep you more restrained.”

“No.” Strife smiled, but it was a bitter gesture, one of regret. “If I had to take a guess, she wanted me to grow stronger faster.” He set the clothes down gently, then gave Silence and Shade—at least Death presumed she was there—a quick grin. “Now let’s see if the two of you are right. Let’s find Conquest.”

Death took a deep breath and just barely resisted the urge to rub his temples in frustration.

His youngest brother had chosen his name well. He truly was relentlessly incorrigible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I just say how utterly happy I am that I no longer have to tip-toe around his name anymore? I mean, do you guys have any idea how hard it is to write dialogue for a character who does not know his own name in-universe?


	6. First Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strife is finally reunited with the nephilim horde. As they move on to a new world to vanquish, he realizes that he still has a long way to go before anyone in his family will truly consider him a proper nephilim.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that this chapter took forever. Hopefully I'll find more time to write in June.
> 
> On the bright side: FURY!

There was nothing left.

Strife took one step outside of the tent and immediately froze in his tracks. As far as his eyes could see—and they could see farther than anybody else’s in the village—there was nothing left. No village. No swamps. No mountains. The ash he stood in reached almost to his waist. It was soft and gray and it smelled of death. Not the putrid, heavy smell of decay, but the stale scent of something long dead. The wind that lightly grazed the endless expanse of dust was barely more than a sigh.

“Did we... move very far?”

“We didn’t move at all,” Silence explained with a sheepish grin. “Death insisted on treating your injuries right then and there.” Somehow, even though she was sunk up to her chest into the ashes, Silence managed to hop along in front of him. She stopped just a few feet ahead. “This is where you battled Absalom. This is where you fell.”

 _Then this is where the village had been_ , Strife thought and the dread that curled in his gut made the hairs on his neck stand up. It was really all gone.

“We should keep moving,” Shade whispered from next to him. Her voiced sounded hollow and its echo jumped over the plains like a pebble over a lake. “Absalom will be angry if we don’t catch up.”

It was the first time he ever heard her sound anything that came remotely close to scared.

Silence moved first, with a grace that shouldn’t have been possible for one half-buried in ash. Shade hopped beside her, leaving small footprints, almost child-like, as she pranced over the dust. She didn’t sink, not like him, stuck wading through what was left of the planet he had been born on.

“Get a move on. All of you.”

It was Death of course, the only other Nephilim who had stayed behind. He too was up to his waist in dust, but he moved almost unnaturally fast. Strife supposed it was to be expected. Death could be the swiftest thing of all.

_Or perhaps I’m just not strong and fast enough. Yet._

And so the trek began.

At first, he counted the steps. Somewhere past two-thousand, he realized it was absolutely pointless. The ground beneath his feet did not change. The ash around him did not change. Even the white sun, standing tall and searing in the sky, did not change. Silence kept humming some old, half-forgotten melody that sounded both haunting and beautiful, Shade kept dancing circles around her, and Death kept marching on, seemingly resolute not to say another word to any of them.

It felt like he was going in circles, stuck in a time loop. Not that he had ever experienced a time loop, but if he had to take a guess, he imagined this is what it felt like.

“Hey Silence!”

His older sister didn’t turn. Instead, she slowed down her steps until it almost seemed like the sea of ash was pushing her back to him. She was busy brushing dust out from underneath her pointy nails when he finally caught up with her.

“How do you do this anyhow?” When she shot him a quizzical look, Strife frowned. “All of this.” He gestured at the wasteland around them. “Just how? I know this place! There were mountains here. And forests and swamps. How?”

“Famine.” Silence shrugged. “Famine usually goes first. You need to watch her next time!” Suddenly, there was a manic glee in her eyes that would have been downright unsettling, had he not seen her constantly smiling brother and the madly rambling crone already. “I’ve seen her shrink and shrivel demons to husks in seconds when she feeds!”

 _She could certainly use the meat on her bones_ , Strife almost blurted out. He caught the words at the last moment. Somehow he had a feeling like Famine was not someone he should joke about next to Silence. Not while they were in the middle of nowhere.

“Then comes Tempest.” Shade whispered to his left. “You do NOT want to quarrel with Tempest.”

“I won’t,” Strife said. _I will_ , he thought. He was already waist-deep in ash and bad decisions. He might as well take the dive.

“And last but not least, there’s Blaze.” Silence frowned.

“He’s a brute.” Shade sounded almost offended.

“You should stay away from him,” Silence warned.

“You definitely should,” Shade nodded vigorously.

“For your own sake.”

“If you want to live.”

“Uh-huh.” Strife nodded and the tiniest hint of a grin that curved Silence’s lips confirmed his suspicions. “This isn’t payback for shooting you, is it?”

Silence laughed. A moment later, she rushed ahead and he felt the temptation to reach for her black curls and knock some sense into her tingle in his fingers.

Instead, he waited until Shade was dancing in front of him, as if to taunt him for his slow going. Strife snatched her ankle with one quick swipe and pulled hard.

The yelp that escaped her just before he dragged her under the dust pierced the silence over the plains like an arrow. Silence spun around first, followed soon by Death, who, if such a thing was even possible, looked even more annoyed than before.

“What the devils did you do now?”

“I’m teaching a lesson,” Strife replied tersely, as he changed his grip from her ankle to the scruff of her neck. She tried to reach for his gun, but he caught her hands quickly enough. As a matter of fact, having her submerged in the dust only made it easier to find her. She could hide her form from sight, but she couldn’t hide her mass and he felt it push the ash around her. Thankfully, the gothar had taught him how to handle wild things.

By the time he pulled her back out of the dust, the tiny flakes had settled on every inch of her skin. Death’s look changed to one of curiosity and Strife supposed that was only fair. He probably didn’t get to see her very often after all.

“Put me down!”

“As you wish.” She hadn’t said how. Strife dunked her back into ash one more time before letting go of her and watched her come up sputtering and cursing in what he vaguely recognized as the demon tongue. Another little bit of knowledge Lilith had ‘blessed’ him with, although he recognized the tone more than the words. “If you girls keep on trying to find creative ways to murder me, I’ll keep on finding creative ways to punish you.”

“If they wanted you dead, you’d be a corpse already,” Death scoffed.

“Of course.” Strife shrugged. Shade had caught up to her sister once more, shaking off the dust as she went along. She was almost invisible again. Silence on the other hand had gone from honoring her name to chatting away like a bird in a tree. “But then again... does this seem like punishment to you?”

***

They were waiting at the base of the tree. All of them. Strife swallowed hard as his eyes took in the change of scenery in front of him.

One minute, there had been nothing but ash. Then, as if it had just sprouted up from the ground a second ago, the tree suddenly reached up to the heavens. The trunk itself must have been at least a mile wide. Its roots went everywhere, twisting and gnarling through the ash and even further below. Strife couldn’t see them, but he had the distinct feeling that they probably reached down to the planet’s core. Its crown, broad and layered and shining golden and red in the sun, seemed to stretch almost as wide and as high.

The angels called it the Tree of Life. The demons called it the Tree of Death.

Right now, it would have been better called the Tree of the Nephilim. Like a colony of ants his brothers and sisters swarmed around the roots of the tree. There seemed to be far too many and yet far too few at the same time.

“Exactly how many of us are there?”

“At the moment, six-hundred and twenty, including you,” Death replied tersely. “Try not to pick a fight with every single one of them.”

 _Not all at once, at least_ , Strife grudgingly and silently conceded. Still, it sounded like a fun challenge.

Somewhere from the depths of his memories, Daragh sighed and shook her head at him. _‘Hopeless calf.’_

The crowd parted quickly as Death and Silence approached. Strife watched with a hint of a grin on his lips as Shade decided to take a different route instead, using the shoulders of her younger siblings as stepping stones to cut across the crowds even quicker and drawing annoyed grunts and the occasional demonic curse in return. Part of him wondered if she did that often, but then again there probably wasn’t much call for it. As far as he could tell, all the firstborn were gathered closest to the trunk of the tree, undisputed leaders who might call themselves brothers and sisters, but who actually inhabited their own little privileged bubble of seniority.

And at the very front of that small crowd sat Absalom, of course. Strife squinted against the harsh glare of the white sun and the gleam of the reins he was holding. The horse Absalom sat on seemed... unnatural, not of any world know to demons or angels, with a mane of black flame and a coat so dark it seemed to swallow all light that touched it, save for the fiery runes that seemed carved, rather than branded along its neck. It was the only horse Strife could see. Another bit of privilege. Predictable.

“And where do you think, you’re going, fledgling?”

He hadn’t even realized that the ranks were closing up again just in front of him until one of his brothers grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back. His first instinct was to punch whoever it was in the teeth. Then again, if he caused any more delays, Absalom was likely to kill him right here and now.

Strife sighed and swallowed his disappointment. “Do you have a problem?”

“Yes, you,” the other nephilim lobbed back. Under an old, sturdy helmet with twisted horns, two moss green eyes glared at him. “Unblooded warriors belong in the back. Try cutting ranks again and I will cut off your feet.”

 _Charming_. Strife frowned. Even at a cursory glance he could tell that he was outmatched, both in strength and in sheer numbers. He would have to work on changing that.

At the front of the crowd, Absalom gave him one last frustrated frown—Strife doubted he was ever going to stop wanting him dead—before turning his horse around and approaching one of the many circular hollows created by the trees roots. For a moment, the roots of the tree shook and the air seemed to vibrate with them, before waves of black and blue started rippling across the one of the hollows they formed. They swallowed horse and rider with a soft squelch. Soon, the other Nephilim started filing through, one by one or sometimes in pairs. As tedious as the waiting was, it did give him a good chance to watch his brothers and sisters and determine who might be least likely to crush him as soon as he looked at them wrong, and though he had arguably more practice at reading the facial expressions of gothar than those of nephilim, one thing was clear in the expressions of almost every single warrior who stepped through the portal: a bloodlust, an almost ardent desire to put this broken and shorn world behind them and head for news lands with fresh blood to be spilled. On the back of his neck, his hairs started rising in a mixture of anticipation and uncertainty. He could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, faster and more erratic, even as he shuffled forward slowly, following the movement of the horde.

It was, he finally realized just a few feet away from the portal, the equivalent of what he had seen in the faces of his brothers and sisters. He wanted to leave. To move on. To fight. To kill.

And yet, his feet stopped as he reached the portal. The vertical pool of black and blue flickered in front of him, inviting him to step through, and yet something at the bottom of his soul stopped his feet and paused his mind. Strife turned around slowly and felt the realization hit him harder than Absalom’s axe.

Yes, there was nothing left of this world, except for ash as far as the eye could see and the Tree of Life, lonely and forsaken in the middle of the wasteland, and yet this had been home to him, even if only for a little while. This is where he had been born. This is where he had learned to be, to live. His mind fumbled for a word to put to the emotion that coursed through his soul, but came up woefully empty. Demons never were much for sentimentality, after all, and it was a demon who had shaped his knowledge. He would puzzle it out later. _After stepping through the damn portal_ , Strife chided himself. _After making sure I don’t get stranded in this desert_.

Strife took one more breath and one more step.

The ashen desert vanished. The tree vanished. All sound and sight vanished. Grays and reds made way for stark white. There was no more ground and no more sky and yet he could feel more than see that there was up and down, left and right. Damn him, though, if he knew where any of it led. What was there to his left? Emptiness. To his right? Emptiness. He was being carried somewhere by some unseen current pulsating all around him, but where it came from, he could not tell. He could not see the others. He could not hear his own breath. Only the pounding of the blood in his veins remained, feeding a sensation of impatience that quickly grew into frustration.

He had been in this place—whatever it was—for less than a minute and yet he already wanted out of it. It was beyond boring, beyond tedious.

Then, as if the Creator had not forsaken this universe centuries ago and was instead listening to the ramblings of his mind, something fluid, yet hard slapped against this face and chest. Out of the corners of his eyes, Strife could see flashes of black and blue piercing through the emptiness. Less than a second later, gravity resumed its grip on his form and his feet hit solid ground again. Even though it could not have been more than two minutes since he had left the world of his birth, the very motion of walking suddenly seemed alien to his feet and he stumbled forward like a newborn calf.

He came to a stop when a four-fingered hand clad in chainmail gripped his shoulder.

“Easy, brother. Take a breath. Stand tall. The first time travelling through a reflecting pool is always awful.”

Strife nodded and for once did as he had been told. Standing did seem to be a better idea than walking right now and though the sudden stop made his stomach turn, at least the rest of him returned to some semblance of steadiness. The sister who had stopped him was almost a head shorter than he was, yet the countless scars on her face suggested she had been born many generations before him, as did her quick stride through the crowd to the middle ranks.

In other good news, coming through the portal last meant he was now standing at the top of the slope that lead up to the tree’s trunk and had a better few than pretty much every nephilim that did not have wings. The pounding in his veins continued, but it seemed less urgent now, less feral. It was as if all the aggression had been zapped from his blood-lust, leaving behind nothing but an insatiable curiosity.

 _A new world. An entirely new planet, with different environs, different creatures._ The prospect pushed the last bits of vertigo he had felt out of his body. Strife took a deep breath and surveyed his new surroundings.

For starters, this tree was definitely of death, rather than life. Its branches were old and gnarly, its crown leafless and covered in soot. Far above, a blood-red sky stretched on as far as he could see. The ground beneath his feet was solid, jagged black rock, marred by fissures that alternated between glowing with orange fire and spitting gray streams of scalding air. In the distance, a range of equally uncomfortable-looking mountains pierced the sky. Around one of them, clouds the color of a deep purple bruise swirled slowly, sending glaring white lightning into the ground. At the foot of the hill, where the tree’s roots finally sunk into the ground for good, a pair of dark towers stood, guarding what looked like an outpost of some sorts.

Strife marched off to the left, ignoring the frequently puzzled and occasionally annoyed looks of his brothers and climbed up one of the roots to the side. Where his knife sank into the bark, black sap oozed forward, slickening the wood, but he paid it no mind. He had learned to scale treacherous terrain from the best hunter of house Etu-Goth and though even getting to the top of this root would not give him as great a vantage point as the six brothers and sisters of his that were circling above the crowd with their distinctly not angelic wings, it would still give him a better few.

“Silence. Shade.” Absalom was grinning. “You know what to do.”

The twins stepped forth from behind their oldest brother, nodded and made their way down the slope to the towers.

 _Is he really sending the two of them in there alone?_ Strife felt his eyebrows climb up his forehead. He had no doubt that Silence and Shade could wreak some havoc if they wanted. Still, it seemed like quite a gamble. Especially since he counted at least four dozen demons in that camp.

He tracked Shade first, as she ran straight up to the tower on the left, clambered up its spiked walls like she had never done anything else in her life, and drove her hand straight into the lookouts throat. She took his vocal cords with her as she withdrew her hand, gripped his spear, and threw it easily into the neck of the right-hand tower guard. Silence grinned at her from below, stepped into the camp, and screamed with a voice that was so far removed from the bird call she had used on the gothar home world, Strife momentarily doubted that he was listening to the same person. But it was her. That deep, guttural, wretched, demonic howl had come out of _her_ throat and not a single demon in the camp seemed bothered by it.

 _And that’s the point_ , Strife realized as he watched the sisters move in for the kill. Vicious claws sprang forth from the bracers both of them were wearing and though every single one of the forty-eight demons Strife could count in the camp was taller, stronger and better armed than either of them, it was a woefully unfair fight. The sisters moved like water, flowing around each opponent and tearing out throats with almost surgical precision. Not that it mattered much. Even those that caught sight of them and tried to call for reinforcements, whether by howl or horn, found every single sound ripped from them. The slaughter was fast, efficient and utterly silent, and its only herald had been a cry so much alike those of the demons who now fell that no-one had even bothered to investigate. It was the last mistake anyone in this camp was ever going to make.

Eventually, Shade darted forward and entered the small keep that sat at the back of the outpost. Strife lost sight of her for a minute. Then, she returned with a horned head held firmly in her right hand. The smile on her face was unsettling, even from a distance. Triumphant. Blood-thirsty. Entertained. Slightly unhinged. Definitely begging for more. Silence greeted her in kind and grabbed her hand as they pranced back to Absalom. It was like watching two little girls dance over a field of flowers with a basket of fruits in their hands, except this field of flowers was enemy terrain drowning in blood and the basket was the decapitated head of what looked to be the commander of this outpost.

Death took their price from them with a nod, stuck his scythe into the ground where it transformed into a twisted spear, and spiked the demon’s head on top. A few incantations in a language Strife could not begin to comprehend later, the creature’s eyes sprang open, glaring at the firstborn in unveiled hatred. The curses that rumbled off its tongue... those Strife did understand. Too bad for the demon that none of his wishes would come true.

“Madness.”

Another firstborn stepped forward and it didn’t take him long to recognize her. The rambling, the glaive of spines... she was rather unmistakable. Strife watched as she sank the glaive’s tip into the demon’s temple and one of her fanged hands into the back of Absalom’s head. The shriek that came from the decapitated demon echoed across the rocks and sent his ears ringing and his spine shivering. It was less a scream of agony than a howl of madness. Worst of all. It did not seem to want to stop.

He was just about ready to ask Silence to shut him up, when Madness finally let go of both her victims. Death ripped the demon head off of Harvester and kicked it down the slope. Blood trickled from the puncture wounds Madness had left behind in Absalom’s head, but he hardly seemed to notice. A few seconds later, the flesh, skin and hair grew back, leaving behind no trace of the affliction.

 _And speaking of afflictions_ , Strife realized to his horror, _Absalom has two arms now_. He hadn’t even noticed it before, but now his brain could focus on few other things. It could not have been that long since their second duel. If Absalom’s arm was already grown back, then that meant it had also grown back after their first fight and long before the fall of house Etu-Goth.

The idea that he might have had to face Absalom with both his arms intact in his second duel, had it not been for some very lucky or very skilled gothar, was definitely not a comforting thought.

“Alright, brothers and sisters,” Absalom shouted, almost giddy, “it’s time to slaughter every last living thing on this wretched planet!”

The cheers that erupted from the crowd were unmistakable. This was what everyone had been waiting for. Strife could feel the excitement arching off of each and every single one of them, like invisible sparks. His own pulse reacted in kind, quickening and drumming hard against his skin, but at the bottom of it all, behind the thirst for blood and carnage, a more sinister, dreadful feeling crept up on him, hollow and bleak as the wind howling over the ashes of the gothar plains.

He wished he could feel the same unbridled glee his kin were experiencing. He truly did.

Another one of the firstborn stepped forward, extending his hand to Absalom with a grin. He was the only one who seemed to match their oldest brother in both height and girth, a man built like a mountain with a stony face to match. The ground shook beneath his feet at every step. Dust rose slowly from the ground, spinning in circling threads that quickly grew thicker and wider. By the time Strife realized what was happening, it was already too late.

The storm engulfed him completely. Him and every single one of his sisters, yet it felt neither painful nor uncomfortable. His feet were still, but he was moving. They all were, faster than anything with hooves or feathers or both. Every now and then, the storm seemed to pause, spinning in one place and slowing down just the teeniest bit, before resuming its destructive path. Each time it did, a short but sharp sting pierced his core, as if he had lost something that he hadn’t even known he’d possessed.

Until it was eventually his turn.

The tempest— _Tempest_ , Strife realized, _Silence and Shade spoke of him_ —paused once more, but this time, it was as if some invisible hand was pushing him out of the storm, suddenly unwelcome and unbidden. He tumbled as the laws of nature exerted their toll on him once more and crashed straight into one of the thousands of jagged outcrops that dotted the landscape. The impact sent his shoulders ringing, even in spite of the armor. He did not want to imagine what it would have done to him, had he not picked something sturdier from Death’s armory. A thundering sound, half growl, half snarl, sounded above him and when he opened his eyes again, a shadow was blotting out the sky. In the second it took him to get his bearings, he saw horns, upside down wings and an axe.

Strife froze. What in all the hells was it with people twice his size trying to murder him by splitting his head open with battle axes? His hand quickly went to Mercy. Strife aimed and pulled the trigger...

... and hit nothing.

The demon in front of him fell to the ground with a loud thud and an angry battle cry. The glowing red snare that had caught his ankles unwound, snapped back and returned with double the force, cutting through flesh and armor in a flurry of vicious strikes that turned the unfortunate demon to shreds of dead meat in mere seconds, before recoiling to its owner.

She was one of his sisters, that much Strife could tell at a single glance, even though he could not see any mark on her one bare shoulder. The solid, glowing, creamy white of her eyes and the elegant, pitch black markings that framed them reminded him more of the angels than the demons—not that he had ever seen an angel in the flesh—but the way she bared her teeth at him and the sheer bloodlust that radiated from her suggested otherwise.

“Oh no, not you!”

If he had any doubt about her alignment before, it vanished as she spoke. Strife had a hard time imagining that someone with such a deeply bitter voice would even be capable of the whimsical and melancholic theatrics angels were known for.

“Yes, me.” He rose quickly and was pleased to find that whatever had sent him off balance had vanished into thin air. He was steady on his feet. Nothing seemed broken. A decent start. “Problem, sister?”

“Yes, you!” For a moment, that wrathful face of hers twisted into a display of disgust, before returning to what he was now fairly certain was her basic sour mood. “I have had it with Absalom setting me up as nursemaid for you unblooded bastards! I’ll kill him when this is over.”

“No, you won’t.” He said it because he meant it, because he neither believed that she would nor that she could. She was not a firstborn. She would never stand a chance against _Absalom_ of all people. “And I don’t need a nursemaid.”

It was the sound of dozens of angry shouts and running feet that finally drew both their attention back to the objective at hand. To his left, just a few dozen paces up a hill, a dark tower jotted upwards in between the rocky landscape.  Their arrival had not gone unnoticed and the cracked path that led to the tower was quickly filling with what his mind recognized helpfully as the foot soldiers of hell: lower class demons wielding crude axes and maces. Simple foes on their own. Potentially deadly in large groups. On the ramparts, archers and spear-wielders were quickly taking formation, aiming their projectiles at the two intruders.

Was this what Absalom had intended? The two of them against an entire tower of demons? Some of which were undoubtedly more dangerous than the infantry, because no moderately intelligent creature would leave these half-brains in charge.

To any sane being this might have seemed like a terrible idea.

To his right, his sister smirked as the hilt in her right hand sprouted a chain of blood-red blades. Before he could even so much as mention the archers, she was already gone, heading straight for the approaching assault.

Strife shook his head. Terrible strategy, but he had to admit... this looked like fun. Strife took out his knife, climbed up the nearest stretch of wall to the top of the ramparts with the swift and sure-footed movements Shivvan had taught him, and took aim.

The first two archers ended up with holes where their hearts had used to be, before they could even nock. The third found his left hand exploding into bits and pieces of flesh and bone just as he was about to let his arrow fly. Instead of hitting his nephilim sister, it went into the neck of one of the approaching demons. The creature turned around in bright hot fury, swinging his axe at the incompetent bastard... only to have his own head separated from his shoulders by a sharp, cracking whip. The gleam of the whip and his sister’s wine red hair were the only parts of her he could still see in the mass of demons, but then again, he had more important things to worry about.

Such as the spear-wielder who had just thrown a lance covered in flame-bursting growths at his head. Strife cocked his head to the left just in time to avoid worse than a few singed hairs. To any other creature, the close call might have been a sign to retreat. To a nephilim, it was an invitation. The smell of burned hair and flesh mingled with the thick stench of blood from the path below and seemed to seep into every pore of his body. It made his blood boil and his muscles tense. It called to a part inside of him that he had almost forgotten during his time with the gothar.

He was going to kill every single one of these demon bastards.

The spear-thrower that had nicked him was first and the sight of his head hanging onto his shoulders by little more than a tendon or two following a few quick shots from Mercy felt beyond satisfying. Mercy sang in Strife’s hand as he aimed again and again, picking off the guards on the rampart left and right. Every hit, every kill reverberated through his body like the sound of a war drum beating in the distance. It was a feeling beyond mere hatred or anger. He wanted more. Needed more. More blood. More death. More destruction. He wanted to raze this place and turn it to ash.

And then, the last one fell. Strife sneered at the empty ramparts. _Cowards. All of them. Cowards_. Below, the sounds of battle had faded away too and a quick glance confirmed what he had already suspected.

His sister wiped the guts of one particularly unfortunate warrior off of her gauntlets, took one deep breath, and ran off into the tower.

Not a good idea. Even in spite of the relentless pounding of his pulse, Strife couldn’t help having a bad feeling about this. Whoever held this tower knew that they were here now. Unless they were completely hopeless idiots, they would have used the time it took for the front troops to be slaughtered to prepare for a breach.

 _Fine._ Strife squinted against the smoke-heavy air as he stared at the top of the tower. _If she’ll go down, I’ll go up._ He put Mercy back into its holster—and he could have sworn the pang of disappointment he felt at the gesture had been returned by the pistol—grabbed one of the flaming spears, and headed to the nearest wall of the fortress.

Despite being fifty times as high, climbing up the side of the tower proved to be even easier than going up the ramparts. Whoever had constructed this place clearly loved putting the decapitated, tarred heads of their enemies on spikes all around building. In between those and the jagged rocks surrounding the place, it was more a matter of jumping and bracing than actual climbing. It would have been almost boring, had it not been for the many, thinly-slit windows that allowed him to spot the occasional guard running down the stairs to where he presumed his sister was wreaking havoc. Even though part of him felt craven for the stealthy approach, it never ceased to be satisfying sniping them through the windows, watching as their fellow soldiers either stumbled over the falling corpses of their comrades or turned in sudden anger to identify where the shot that had blasted half a demon’s head off had come from. It was all in vain of course. By the time they turned to investigate, he was already gone.

That is, until he reached the top of the tower.

He felt the pull long before he saw his opponent. Something coiled around his ankles, his wrists and his waist like invisible thread. It yanked him straight through the window and into the wall on the other side of the room. Somewhere along the way, the spear slipped from his grasp. Some irregular shape poked uncomfortably against one of the few gaps in the silver plates that protected his back, but aside from that the entire situation was almost amusingly familiar. He was half-expecting to open his eyes to the sight of a raised axe. Again.

Instead, it was a blinding flash of blue that rushed towards him. Strife rolled to the side on sheer instinct and watched as the fire ate through both the small altar of skulls he had been thrown against and the wall just behind it, turning solid black stone into molten sludge.

 _Note to myself: avoid the stone-eating fire_. Strife frowned and jumped to his feet, only to have them swept out from underneath him by the swing of a staff. This time, there was a weapon above his head, only it was a sword, wielded by someone in a deep blue hood with no face. Somehow that was even more disturbing than the ambush. He dodged again, drawing a furious cry from the monster and getting his first good look at his opponent.

She was a female demon, or at least appeared to be so, yet where Lilith—the only female demon he had ever met before—seemed to go out of her way to wear next to nothing, this one was clad from head to toe in long, flowing robes and plates of armor protecting her torso. The sword in her hand seemed to be made of the thinnest metal to the point where it more closely resembled a sheet of ice, yet he had no doubt it would cut through steel as easily as through nephilim flesh and bone. The staff, though surprisingly sleek and elegant for a demon’s weapon, was nonetheless adorned with carvings of dismemberment and murder, leaving little room for imagining what fate was in store for him if he failed.

The solution was simple. He could not fail.

Two swirling circles of blue lightning appeared to his left and right. Strife eyed them with suspicion. Something was wrong and though the demon’s face was, as far as he could tell, nothing but a black void, he could have sworn there was a smile there. He drew Mercy, aimed... and managed to withdraw his hand just in time to avoid it being hacked off by a light blue sword.

The creature that had manifested from the circle to his left was identical to the first demon and he didn’t need to look to his right when he heard a shrill war cry to know that there were now three of them.

_Just fantastic._

He dodged, ducked, and parried as best as he could, what with only a gun and a knife. Each impact of the swords sent his weapons ringing, an unpleasant feeling that spread through the bones of his hand into his arm and his torso. By the third time one of the trio tried to fry him in azure fire, he had learned to call that attack by the hissing sound the staff emitted as it charged, though that gave him half a second of warning at best. In the end, there was no time to aim, no time to push back. He dodged, he ducked. He survived.

Absalom would be terribly disappointed.

_Daragh would be terribly disappointed._

The thought hit him out of nowhere and nearly saw him a head shorter by the blade of a sword. He spit out the first curse that came to his mind—incidentally something in the demonic language, judging from the way his three opponents laughed even as they continued their assault. Why did he have to think of that now? He didn’t need distractions. Not here. Not now. Not when six arms did their best to kill him.

 _‘Except there aren’t six of them’_ , Daragh’s voice echoed in his mind and he knew instantly that she was both right and wrong. The arms were real. The swords were real. The staffs were real. The fire, the laughter—all of it was real, but only one of the three figures was the original. All he needed was an opening, a chance. He needed something to keep them at bay, just for one damn second.

He had almost resigned himself to merely waiting for his sister to show up and even the odds a little when he nearly tripped over the spear. For the first time since this fight had begun, Strife felt a smile on his lips as he dropped the gun and knife and kicked the spear up into his hands instead.

It was exactly the right length. A blood-curdling scream erupted from all three shapes as he blocked their next strike and the impact burst the flaming boils attached to the spear, sending bits and pieces of fiery hot metal flying into his attackers. Two crumbled to dust, the other howled as pale blue blood oozed from the burn on her arm.

“There you are!”

Strife grabbed what was left of the spear tightly and threw it straight into her shoulder, just above where her armor ended. The demon retreated and shrieked as she pulled out the metal rod, taking chunks of her flesh with it. Granted, it had not stopped her for long, but now he knew which one was the real one. He picked up his gun and knife again and looked up just in time to watch her summon another two decoys and a net of blue tendrils that enclosed her like a cocoon                .

It wouldn’t matter. The drumming in his blood had returned, the urge to kill stronger than ever. It felt like electricity arching through his body, only stronger, darker and far less natural. If she wanted optical illusions, she could have them.

Strife dashed forward and was pleased to see that his opponents had indeed aimed just an inch too high. Exactly as he had wanted them to. It wasn’t their fault that he was not as tall as he suddenly appeared to be. The split second of confusion they displayed at the failed attack was enough for him to shoot and stab them at the same time. Somehow, he was even faster now, faster than he knew he could be, and before he was even aware of what he was doing, he was unloading a barrage of magical bullets onto the demon sorceress.

Not a single one of them made it through the cocoon. The sorceress threw back her head and laughed.

“Fool! No metal can pass through my web!”

“No metal, huh?” Alright, that was problematic. Especially since he could already feel the power that had been surging through him ebb again. On the bright side, that meant she could not move either.

Strife holstered his gun, sheathed his knife and stripped off his right-hand gauntlet, then dashed straight at her.

He liked to think that the last though that went through that faceless head of hers as his bare hands pierced through the cocoon and tore her spine out through her throat was something along the lines of ‘impossible!’ or ‘this can’t be!’ Ultimately, it did not matter. She died all the same. Quiet, except for the gurgling of her blood as it bubbled up from her wounds.

“Well, damn...” He had actually done it. He should thank Shade later for her earlier, excellent demonstration of how to tear out someone’s throat. Strife laughed as he wiped his hand clean on the demon’s robe. It hurt like he had broken something, but that was hardly a high price to pay. He could fix it later. Daragh had taught him all about the many different kinds of magic that were commonly stored in shards of varies sizes. Surely he could find a piece of some poor bastard’s soul that had been trapped as a quick healing boost somewhere in this damn fortress.

For now, he had to find his sister.


	7. Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of his first victorious duel, Strife explores the rest of the tower he's conquered and learns much more about himself, his sister, and his own people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank whomever at Airship Syndicate had the idea of making Strife more snarky than silent. That's exactly the direction I was hoping to go with him anyway.

If Strife had only had his eyes for orientation, finding his sister might as well have been a quest for a demon that did not lie or an angel that did not preach. It took all of one glance outside the sorceress’ chambers to tell him that the top of this tower had been designed to be unreachable. Just outside the door, the hall split into a dozen paths, each with winding staircases and weird angles that made him wonder just how many demons had broken their neck on the way up or down, not to mention how all of it fit into one tower. Somehow he had the troubling feeling that these were even more illusions, set by the sorceress through magic that did not end with her death.

Thankfully, he had more than his eyes.

The air was cold and stale in each of the halls, but only three of them had a smell of their own.

One of them smelled of fresh blood mingled with sweat, of steel and smoke and burned flesh. From its dark depths, Strife could hear the angry, guttural growling and snarling of demons who thought they were still fighting when in truth they had already lost. His sister’s angry cries and occasional taunts echoed between them, underscored by the crack of her whip.

The second tunnel also smelled of blood and sweat, steel and smoke and burned flesh, but the scents were old, and almost smothered by the putrid stink of decay. Something had died in those halls. Something else was still dying right now. He could hear its gasping, rattling breath, faint as the brush of a feather.

The third hall was silent as a crypt and almost sterile in its absence of organic scent, but he could smell copper and iron and smoke from a torch. As a matter of fact, it was the only hall he could see into, the only one illuminated ever so lightly by bits and pieces of crystal hewn into its black walls. The floor, seemingly absent at first glance, sprang into existence stone by stone as he reached into the darkness.

Someone or something wanted him to go this way. Which meant it was probably a bad idea.

Strife drew Mercy with his uninjured hand and proceeded anyway.

The path was long and winding and it crumbled behind him with every step he took, yet it felt safer than any other ground he had covered in this tower. Though the pieces of floor with their dimly glowing runes were thin as the soles of his boots and apparently held up by nothing but some unknown spell and the power of his imagination, they did not buckle or tremble under his step. Each pace gained him a few more blocks in front and lost him a few more in the back. At some point, he felt as if going downhill, which surely made no sense, given that he had seen the dimensions of this tower from the outside and he should have come out of its other side already, but then again, this was apparently a dominion claimed by the demons of hell. Things did not need to make sense here. As a matter of fact, if the knowledge he had inherited was to be trusted, he would have been more worried if they had made sense.

As a consequence, Strife was hardly surprised when the walkway of glowing stones ended as abruptly as it had begun and the hall opened up into a massive vault. One moment there had been nothing. Then there was... everything. Strife’s eyes widened at the sight.

He had never seen this much gold in any single place, which, granted, was not a difficult feat to achieve—the Gothar elders lived humbly and gold made for miserable armor, thus making it unattractive to his nephilim brethren. Still, he had to admit that he was impressed. Where had this vault come from? Who had amassed all those coins? _Gilt_ , a part of his mind realized, _this is what passes for currency among the Old Ones and the two Kingdoms_. What was in all those shiny, yet sturdy, chests with their beckoning locks?

Most importantly, though: who was guarding all of this? Somehow he doubted it was the sorceress he had slain. Was there another high-ranking demon in this tower? He couldn’t feel anything. Maybe some other creature? Of the abyss or otherwise? The Gothar had often told tales of great dragons and wyrms, crows and harpies, who hoarded treasures and defended them with tooth and claw and fed off the corpses of unlucky adventurers. Whenever they had dealt with a calf who was in desperate need of a good scolding, they had even spoken of Avarice, with his thousand long, spindly fingers, and how he would come to their homes at night and feast on the bones of any child who had dared steal from another. What fun memories from the supper fires.

“I guess I should keep my hands to myself.” Strife frowned.

_To hell with it._

He went for one of the simpler chests first. As decidedly un-fancy as it looked, he could hear a humming and feel vibrations coming from it that he recognized as magic bottled up in mundane containers, like the spells woven into the threads in Daragh’s hair or the Fortification charms given to Gothar hunters. The damn thing was locked of course, but that would not stop him for long. He felt around the seams where the box and the lid met, searching for any signs of hidden traps and found none. With a deep breath, Strife jammed the blade of his knife into the lock and spoke the words Reü had taught him.

He could not feel the blade softening, could not see it reshape itself to fit the mold of the lock, but he could feel the toll the magic took on his body. He truly had been an abysmal student of magic, a hopeless case among house Etu-Goth, had it not been for the hunters praising his skill. The fact that even this little bit of sorcery had any detrimental effect on him was just another sign that he had a lot of catching up to do. A. Lot.

It was all the more reason to stock up on whatever was in the damn chest. Strife cursed under his breath as he worked the blade deeper into the lock, twisting and turning it until the chest finally clicked open. The soft and warm glow that came from within sheared the edges off of his ire and somehow even managed to soothe the pain in his broken hand. He took a deep breath and started counting.

There were sixteen shards in the box, more than half of them shining like molten iron. He could feel their power vibrate underneath his finger tips, reaching deep down into his soul, to the same place the rage that had enabled him to kill the sorceress had come from. If Daragh had ever explained these to him, he had no memory of it, but he considered it unlikely that she had. As harmless as these little splinters of gold looked, he could tell they were instruments of death and if they were fueled by necromancy, no self-respecting Gothar would have wanted any part of them.

The remaining shards seemed dim by comparison, but even he wasn’t beginner enough to be fooled by that. Two of them shone in fiery red and he could all but hear their hum bounce around his skull in tones both dark and light at the same time, like mocking laughter that shifted between derision and amusement. ‘Strength shards’ was what Daragh had always called them, right after warning him not to give in to the temptation of using them. Yes, they could make a warrior several times more powerful. They might even have been able to make him powerful enough to not be completely hopeless in battle against Absalom, but they were supposed to sap their power straight from the wielder’s soul. And who was to say that any nephilim had much of a soul? They had been created from ash after all. Ash and the flesh of Absalom and whatever witchcraft Lilith had used.

Strife shook himself in disgust. The less to be said about Lilith, the better. He reached for one of the remaining, green shards and gripped it tightly, relishing the flow of magic as he cracked the surface and its essence spilled onto his hands and through his body. The bones and muscles of his hand itched and stung as they were knitted back together, but he supposed that was only fair to whatever poor creature had had to sacrifice a piece of its soul to fuel the shard. He was about to pocket the rest and had just started questioning _where_ exactly he was going to pocket them, when his ears picked up an unfamiliar sound.

It came from his right, a gnarling, scratching, twisting noise like metal bent into unnatural shapes with great force. He stood up and aimed Mercy instantly, but there was nothing there. The pile of gilt had not shifted an inch. Everything was still in its place.

Then the noise came from his left. From behind. From in front. From above and below and from every corner of the vault, until he was no longer sure whether it was real at all or just in his head.

And was it just his imagination or were the walls and ceiling coming closer?

“Duck!”

That was all the warning he got, but he would have been a fool not to heed it. He dropped to one knee, gun in one hand, knife in the other, and forced every muscle in his body to remain still, as a flurry of dark magic erupted around him. Like a cone of half-molten metal, purple waves crashed down all around him, scorching a perfect circle of destruction into the ground. The vault trembled and all but howled as the whip slowly came to rest, to fade away into nothingness, until only the hilt was left.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed or are you just stupid?” To his right, his sister bared her teeth.

Strife shrugged. “Maybe I just like making you work for the privilege of looking after the youngest generation.”

The punch connected hard. It sent his head ringing and three of his teeth flying. Strife spit a mouthful of blood after them and watched as the vault’s floor all but gobbled it up. They were going to grow back, of course, but it still hurt.

“I will not hesitate to strangle you in your sleep, you insufferable ingrate,” his sister huffed. “Where were you anyway? Running from the fight like a little coward?”

“Nah...” He wiped the blood off his split lip with the back of his hand and moved his jaw left and right carefully. Nothing broken. That was good news for a change. “Decided to take a little detour and go for the big fish instead.”

“The big fish?”

“Sorceress. Faceless. Long robes. Liked to create mirror images of herself. Webbed herself up in some magical cocoon when I—” She wasn’t even listening. Instead, his sister was inspecting the vault, fingers still curled tightly around the hilt of her whip. Anger sparked in Strife’s gut. “You know, I killed her. Alone. Without any help. While you were busy tangling with the small fry. What do you say to that?”

“I say you’re mighty foolish to walk into vault maw while completely drained of wrath.”

“Vault maw? Wrath?”

His sister flinched, froze, and turned around slowly. Judging from the look on her face, he might as well just have asked her if fire was wet or snow was hot.

“Are you serious?”

“I can pretend that I’m not, if that makes you feel better.”

“You truly are hopeless.” She shook her wine red mane and reached down into the chest to pick up one of the yellow shards. A moment later, its arcane magic pulsed through her and the crystal was no more. “Wrath. It’s what builds up inside you when you strike your foes and it’s what most species in this wretched universe use for magic. I assume those goats you vacationed with were one of the exceptions.”

“Gothar,” Strife corrected, “and they took their powers from the foundations of the environment around them.” He thought back to the sorceress, to the almost uncontrollable urge to kill that had taken hold of him near the end of the battle. “This... wrath... it feels like lightning flowing through your body, doesn’t it?”

“Oh good, you got it.” His sister frowned. “Hang on a moment and duck.”

Strife did as he was told and watched her repeat the same attack she had done before. Once more, the walls trembled and receded. Once more she bent down to replenish her wrath.

“So this ‘vault maw’ thing you mentioned—”

“It’s a living breathing creature and we are currently standing in its mouth,” his sister cut in quickly. Then almost as an afterthought, she added: “Do not touch the gilt.”

That of course, only made him want to touch it even more. Thankfully, his attention was soon drawn to the weapons his sister dug out of the pile of gold and discarded just as fast. He considered picking up one or two of them for himself, but quickly decided against it. As much as he hated to admit it, he lacked the necessary practice—and likely also the necessary strength—to wield them effectively. He’d have to pick his battles carefully for now and hopefully build up enough strength in time to challenge some of his siblings to battles that would not end in certain death. Then he might actually have a chance to master all those things nephilim were supposed to be good at—swords, axes, maces, war hammers, spears, glaives and halberds—preferably before he had to face somebody in a real fight who actually, truly wanted him dead.

His sister turned to the remaining chests and cracked them open one by one without even so much as touching them. Instead, a magical glow that was halfway between red and purple extended from her hand as she ripped the lids off the containers and inspected their contents. Some of them contained various potions and talismans, others more gold, others slivers and fragments of adamantine. Those were the only ones she took.

“Well, it looks like your sorceress had pathetic taste in equipment.”

“Or she just paid up diligently to someone higher in the food chain.” Strife shrugged. “Does this place seem like the home of a great demon to you?”

“Certainly not.” For the first time since he had seen her run head-on into a horde of demons, a grin stretched across her face. “So much for your _glorious_ victory.”

“Aw, you _are_ upset you didn’t get to bring down their leader.” Strife grinned right back at her. Yes, this was likely a stupid idea. It was also too much fun.

“I’m not.”

“You’re right. ‘Upset’ is the wrong word. More like ‘jealous’.”

“I’M NOT—” The whip glowed blood-red in her hand and he dodged just in time to avoid any major damage. Somehow, Mercy had found its way into his hand. He watched the inch of hair the whip had separated from his head float onto its barrel as he raised it and aimed for her head.

“Well... this escalated quickly.”

“Oh you think?” The whip recoiled, but the anger in her voice did not. “I swear I’m going to kill either you or Absalom before we’re off of this stinking planet! Maybe both of you.”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

“Begging for your life now?” The disgust in her voice was almost tangible. “What a pathetic excuse of a—”

“The pathetic excuse who’d let you live,” Strife muttered as he holstered his pistol. “Do you remember your first day in this universe? Do you really want to fight Absalom _again_? _Really_?”

For a moment, he was fairly certain she was going to say ‘yes’, if only out of spite. Then, his sister sighed. “Alright, grab what you want and let’s find something else to kill then. And I’m not ruling out making _you_ one head shorter yet!”

“You don’t say...” Strife murmured as he reached for the remaining healing and wrath shards. Despite being relatively small, there were more than enough of the small crystals to overflow in his hand. Judging from the way his sister’s armor fitted, he doubted she had stored her adamantine in pockets either. Strife sighed. This question _was_ likely to see him to the grave much sooner than either one of them had anticipated. Pity.

“So, um... where exactly do you put these?”

 _And there it is again. The ‘did you just ask if fire is wet’ look._ Strife would have laughed had they not stood in the middle of a living, breathing, ravenous vault of fake gold following a nearly fatal standoff over something as ridiculous as a single kill.

“You are joking.”

“I am definitely not.”

“You have _got_ to be joking.”

“I’d say I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m definitely not that either.”

This time there was no warning, except for the sound of leather curling around the whip’s hilt and the clacking of her heels as she jumped. Strife ducked on sheer reflex and waited until the crackling magic had scorched another ring into the floor, before rising again to meet her disappointed stare. He wasn’t quite sure whether she had aimed for him or the vault. Either way, his blood was still inside his body and his bones still in one piece. That had to suffice for now.

“You are completely hopeless.” When he didn’t bother to dignify the statement with a reply, his sister sighed. “Fine, show me your gauntlet.”

 _Gauntlet. Right._ Strife rolled his eyes. He had completely forgotten to put it back on after healing his broken hand. He slipped back into the thin fabric quickly and watched as the plates molded to his forearm and fingers and fused with the rest of the armor. He held out his arm to her and watched as she etched a small set of ruins into the plate that guarded his wrist with that same arcane force she had used to open the chests. The letters sunk into the metal swift as water into loose soil and faded away just as quickly.

“What you need to use instantly, you carry on your belt. What you only need to store, you put in a pocket dimension,” his sister eventually explained. “Each piece of armor worth its price comes with one. It’s like a small void, floating just above the metal. These runes should make it easier for you to access.”

“Small void. Got it.” He had really had no clue. Had Lilith just forgotten to put that knowledge into his brain or had nearly getting murdered by Absalom twice just knocked it out his head? A question for the philosophers, one he would have gladly postponed to whenever he was not under scrutiny of someone who was likely to punch him in the face or worse if he got it wrong, same as he would have loved postponing the actual storing of these shards, but at least one of those two had to be done right now. He could tell from the way his sister’s eyes narrowed more and more every second.

It was in that moment, biting back a snide remark about how ‘Patience’ clearly was not her name that he realized that neither had he bothered to ask her for her name yet, nor had she volunteered the information. Daragh would have had his hide if she could see him now.

Strife sighed, closed his eyes, and focused his attention on his forearm with the runes. At first, there was nothing and it took him a moment to understand that that was exactly what he had been looking for. A void. Nothing. Once he approached it from that angle, it was impossible _not_ to notice the bubble of emptiness clinging to the armor.

“Try to visualize it. As a box, a chest, a vault... whatever. Imagine putting the shards in there.”

It was easier said than done. In his mind, the chest shifted sizes, forms and colors just as frequently has his own hair did. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to hold onto any one thought, any one imagination, for more than a few seconds. He just couldn’t and that only left him even more frustrated. Short of matters of life or death, his mind seemed determined to wander, an impulse which, as far as he could tell, slumbered within every nephilim, but did not usually go beyond the physical need to get up and walk, to fight, and a certain reluctance to actually settle anywhere for long. Lilith truly had done an absolutely fantastic job putting him together. One day, he was going to have to pay her back for her sterling efforts.

In the end, it was sheer stubbornness rather than skill that caused the shards to fade from his hand. The void above his arm felt just a little heavier for a moment, before returning to a pleasant hum of nothingness.

“Good.” His sister nodded and replenished her wrath reserves once more. “Now let’s get out of here. I want kill something! Or someone!”

“What about this vault maw then?” Strife gave a cursory glance at the walls and ceiling. They were coming closer again, only now that he knew it was happening, he could actually see the change rather than be surprised by it. “We could start with that.”

“If you want to plunge your hands into that mountain of fake gilt and let it bathe your hands in acid while you’re fishing for its heart, be my guest.” His sister shrugged. “Tempest will turn this place to dust soon, anyway. I’ll leave this to him and Blaze. Or to Pestilence. She’s as good as immune to any poisonous or caustic materials.”

“Good to know.” _Don’t try to poison Pestilence. Don’t stick your hands into fake gilt_. _Two important lessons learned_. He followed his sister out of the vault and back onto the bridge of glowing stones. Behind him, the vault all but moaned in disappointment. He wondered briefly just how sentient that thing actually was, before minding his steps once more.

The crossing where the paths had split now reeked of blood. Judging from the trail of heeled prints in red, his sister had slain the last of her foes long before reaching the top of the tower. She disappeared into the sorceress’ chambers quickly—probably to confirm that he had actually done the job correctly. Strife frowned and headed down the last remaining corridor with its own scent that neither of them had set foot in yet.

The path was short this time and it ended in a lift that seemed to be made of bones and sinew, save for the chain that held its weight and a pressure plate in the center, which sent the  lift moving downwards. The shaft was lit only in the faintest of dull, yellow lights, but he could smell the blood that coated it and the stench of vomit, feces, and decay that became stronger the further down he went. Every now and then, something shining and white caught his eye, but never long enough to identify what it was. By the time the lift stopped, there was little doubt where he had ended up.

The floor down here was neither smooth nor polished. It was covered in pieces of broken, distinctly not demonic armor and straw, held together by spilled fluids of all sorts and illuminated by the sickly, pulsating light of torches made from more bones and dried skin. The gates along the hallway were made of thick iron bars, spaced just wide enough to fit a head, but not wide enough to fit a pair of shoulders. Flies and maggots swarmed around the openings and the smell of death was strongest behind them.

This place was a prison, a dungeon, and judging from the severed limbs he could see in the darkness of some of the cells, nobody in here had found as clean and quick a death as the demons he and his sister had slain. The guards had deserted their posts, likely either to form a last reserve against the invaders or to run for the tree in order to save their own miserable hides, but Strife doubted that it mattered. Nobody behind these bars was going to get out of here alive, with or without guards, with or without help.

Well, almost nobody. He could hear two sounds over the buzzing of the flies and the distant dripping of water: the creak of the lift, heralding his sister’s arrival, and the heavy breath of some deeply exhausted, badly injured creature. Judging from the wheezing and rasping, at least a few cracked ribs and an intense period of dehydration had been involved. Strife put his hand on Mercy, just in case, and turned to the left when he finally reached the end of the corridor.

The angel was shackled to a ring mounted high on the far wall, her broken arms twisting unnaturally into the raised position. One of the limbs had been flayed and was red and yellow with inflammation. Her hair hung in dirty, twisted strands obscuring most of what was left of her face. Even in spite of the matted tresses, Strife could clearly see the unnatural angle of her broken jaw. The rest of her body had fared no better, bearing the marks of days, if not weeks or months of torture. What truly caught his eye though were her wings.

They were still beautiful. True, they had been nailed to the wall with rusty spikes and broken in a dozen places. True, large patches of them were coated in blood and all manner of things he did not want to think about. True, somebody had apparently started defeathering her left wing piece by piece, leaving naked, broken bones that would never fly again. And yet, there was a rather substantial amount of feathers that had remained white and pure, despite the general dirt and grime and dust of her surroundings. The Gothar had six words for different shades of white, including the glaring, shining white of one of their two suns, and yet he could not think of any word in their language or any other tongue he knew to describe the radiance of the unmarked feathers. They were positively glowing in the dark, a trait which, while probably considered attractive and desirable by an angel in the White City, could not have been helpful in evading the demons. As a matter of fact, he was fairly certain any lowly runt could spot her from a mile away, even if she were to escape this tower somehow.

“Ugh, I thought I smelled bird.” His sister waved her hand in front of her face as if that would somehow make the stench go away. Perhaps this was not a good time to tell her that it was far more likely to cling to both their hair for at least a few baths. “Absalom has lit the beacon. Let’s go.”

“The beacon?”

Once more, his sister seemed ready to punch him. He supposed that was fair. Depending on which brood she had belonged to, she had potentially heard all of these questions up to six-hundred times by now.

“Absalom sends us to smaller outposts in small groups and saves the heart of the fighting for himself and the firstborn. He lights a beacon as soon as his battle begins. Our goal is to get to him and kill everything and everyone along the way.”

“Huh. Better get to it then.” He pulled his gun and aimed through the bars.

“Are you serious?” She sounded downright offended as she slapped his hand down. “Why waste bullets on a pigeon? Let’s go.”

“Please...” The sound was so faint he was almost sure he had imagined it, at least until he saw the slightest hint of movement in the dark. “Please!” She was too weak to even lift her head, but it was undoubtedly the angel who had spoken. Strife could see her body shake and flinch, could hear the breath rattle faster past her broken ribs. “Mercy...”

“To a filthy angel?” His sister scoffed. “I think not!”

“Why? Afraid someone’s gonna start calling you ‘Sunshine’, if you stop being a prickly bitch for a minute? What is your name anyway? Grievance?”

He had seen the punch coming from a mile away and yet somehow his head had refused to move, even as his brain had told his muscles that now would be a good time to get out of the way. Her armored knuckles connected hard, undoubtedly leaving him with yet another ugly bruise in the morning.

Strife barely felt it. He had already gotten much worse from Absalom. When his sister spoke again, her voice was closer to a hiss than to actual speech.

“My name is ‘Fury’! Rot in here with this stupid angel if you want. I’m not wasting any more time on her or you.”

He watched her stalk off in a brisk walk, the clacking of her heels echoing like thunder down the hallway, before being replaced by the sound of the lift once more. The angel cringed at the creaking noise and Strife could hardly blame her. He doubted that sound had ever heralded anything but pain for her.

“Please...”

“Hush. It’s alright.” He aimed once more. Fury was wrong. There was no wasting bullets with a gun with infinite rounds. “It’s over now.”

The shot echoed through every corner of the dungeon, bouncing off every gate and every wall and growing louder each time, to the point where it sent his ears ringing. The angel’s head jerked backwards with the force of the impact and for a glimpse of a second he could see her face, sculpted and smooth like his sister’s, with eyes the same glowing white, framed by markings of the same color. The glow stopped in synch with her heart. Her body hung limp from the shackles. Only now it looked lighter, softer, as if a great burden had been lifted from her.

It truly had been a mercy.


End file.
